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

[julcnx]

@Minh_Nguyen

Should we cut our losses and revert back to the original definition of highway=road, for consistency with seemingly the whole OSM ecosystem apart from the wiki? Do you think we have a fighting chance of de-skunking this tag by reverting the wiki edit? It would be a lot simpler than trying to convince data consumers to adopt a new, aggressively questionable primary tag.

@ezekielf

Reverting the 2016 change sounds like a good idea to me.

Yes it would make things easier, but if we leave pathways out of highway=road, there needs to be a documented consensus on how to tag pathways of unknown classification. I’ve put together a survey for this:

[Survey] How to tag pathways of unknown classification?

poll highway=road highway=road is used for “roads of unknown classification.” These aren’t expected to be routable and should appear in a unique style to encourage mappers to survey and reclassify them based on local knowledge. While not widely used, this tag is incredibly helpful for armchair mapping or importing external data, especially when local knowledge is lacking. Controversial imports (like Facebook and Grab, from what I know) used highway=track or highway=residential without local kn…