Here’s the roundabout I’ve been mapping: OpenStreetMap
In particular, I’m curious if the areas I’ve tagged as area:highway=emergency count as such or should be included in the main road area. Also, with it being a multi-layered roundabout that has a grassy area inside a truck skirt inside the normal driving area, are the multipolygon relations right?
I’ve been including crosshatched virtual medians as part of the main highway area but mapping the road markings to set it off, just based on the road markings I had previously seen mapped. area:highway=emergency implies a linear representation tagged highway=emergency going through the area, but there’s no such tag.
Is there a more descriptive tag than area:highway=unclassified for this truck skirt? I would liken it to a shoulder that’s hgv=designated.
“Some mappers use area:highway=emergency, where they mean to describe road areas that are painted with white hatching that should be avoided in normal traffic flow, but have nothing to do with emergencies.”
Actually if caught the cost of doing so WAS a 150 Euro fine and nobody giving a hoot. Checking up, the ‘My Traffic Fine’ site (LoL) lists the cost ranging from 165-2750 Euro depending on the how and where. That’s a pretty physical grab in someone’s wallet.
Haha. I can’t imagine anyone getting a fine for that in my city. Cars park completely on top of sidewalks and bike lanes for days and when you call the police to get them taken away the illegal parker gets three warnings before anything happens.
I was unaware of this practice. In my opinion, if people want to map the area of a crosshatch or the area of a lane, that’s fine, but we shouldn’t carve it out of the area for a roadway. Instead it should be yet another area overlaid upon the roadway area.
Otherwise, we get into weird edge cases where a particular space is either a travel lane or an emergency shoulder depending on the time of day. This is the same difficultly that forced us to painfully refactor street parking tagging. As difficult as it has been to get data consumers to adopt area:highway, it would be even more difficult to get them to adopt area:highway:conditional when all they want is to depict the road’s physical footprint.
Yes, that much is clear from the documentation, but the whole point of area:highway was to finally begin to map physical road construction as opposed to usage, so encoding regulations about usage into the primary feature tag seems problematic to me in the long run. To me, there’s only one roadway from curb to curb, just set aside for different purposes. What you’ve mapped is certainly useful information, but I think it would be more useful if more clearly distinguished from physical construction.
area:highway=footway corresponds to highway=footway, so it fits the scheme pretty clearly. What I mean is that it isn’t a great idea to overload area:highway with additional values that wouldn’t be appropriate values of highway. That would muddle the meaning of the area:* namespace, which is very useful for micromapping a variety of things.
If you want to map a part of the road that normally would not get mapped as a non-area, due to the physical separation principle, and you don’t think road_marking communicates the concept well enough, you could try coining something that more obviously wouldn’t conflict. For example, highway=lane would never be valid to map due to the physical separation principle, even though it would fall under the definition of highway=*, so area:highway=lane might be reasonable for the area representation.
Anyways, in the U.S., a crosshatched area in the middle of the road isn’t necessarily intended to be an emergency breakdown lane or a space for emergency vehicles. It’s simply an area equivalent to a median or traffic island that no one is supposed to enter. (Some emergency vehicles are allowed anywhere they’re physically capable of going, so this isn’t really relevant.)