It is tiring to read that people pretend that the community has accepted the flowline proposal to replace rivers and streams.
Let’s try to adapt the Flowline logic to highways and see if this is sustainable.
When a motorway is over a bridge or inside a tunnel, we could use highway=flowline. We could also have a “highway=risky” tag for higways over highest suspension bridges, since this is more risky. This way we could map for the renderer and also avoid to apply the highway name for these bridge and tunnel sections. And why not, the relation could take care to provide highway=motorway/primary, etc. No need to use the highway classification from the way. And what’s about using highway=flowline in center of big cities instead of higway=primary/secondary, since with congestion, we cannot see clear traffic flows, surely not priority roads ?
All of this Seems illogic ? Why a logic “We can use relations instead of ways” would be acceptable for waterways, not for highways ?
For a river that start at 600 meters and move down until the sea, why should we pretend that the water flow stops in a lake or reservoir ? That we dont know where it flows ? I assure you that for a reservoir with a dam, there are always structures to assure an exit for the water to flow to the river below. The water clearly flows through these structures. Otherwise there would be risk that the dam collapse with deadly situations down the river. If water was stagnant, we would observe wetlands.