[RFC] Deprecating `highway=road` in Favor of `highway=unknown`

General talk Tagging general discussion
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We can be reasonably confident that certain subsets of highway=road represent roads or streets as opposed to paths:

  • 17,732 (36%) of remaining highway=road ways predate the 2016 edit that seemingly unilaterally redefined highway=road.
  • At least 6,994 (14%) come from a 2013 import of roads (not paths) from the National Land Survey of Finland.
  • 2,324 (5%) have name=*, which we can examine for names that sound like roads or streets.
  • 1,437 (3%) were likely mapped as part of a series of HOT Tasking Manager projects focused on mapping roads in the aftermath of a major earthquake. One of these projects came with an instructional video that advised mappers to tag “main roads” as highway=road so that others could come along later and fill in the classification.

Presumably a highway=road that connects to a road-like way is more likely to be a road than one that only connects to path-like ways. According to QLever, highway=road is 15 times more likely to be connected to a road-like way than a path-like way. By comparison, there are less than five times as many road-like ways as path-like ways.

3,238 intersections between highway=road and highway=bridleway/cycleway/footway/path/steps:

A world heatmap showing hotspots scattered throughout the world, with a particularly high concentration throughout Nepal.
A world heatmap showing hotspots scattered throughout the world, with a particularly high concentration throughout Nepal.1920×1073 90.7 KB

49,479 intersections between highway=road and highway=motorway/motorway_link/trunk/trunk_link/primary/primary_link/secondary/secondary_link/tertiary/tertiary_link/unclassified/residential/busway/bus_guideway/service/living_street/track/raceway:

A world heatmap showing hotspots throughout the world, with a particularly high concentration throughout Finland and India.
A world heatmap showing hotspots throughout the world, with a particularly high concentration throughout Finland and India.1920×1073 105 KB

There are some patterns in these query results that warrant further investigation. For example, 60 highway=road ways in Finland branch off of trunk roads and the like; they could be low-hanging fruit for a resurvey.

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