What's the meaning of the direction of a highway?

pippinu · 2012-05-04T21:21:10.000Z

Beginner question: what’s the meaning of the direction of a highway, if any? I couldn’t find any information about that in the wiki.

It doesn’t represent the direction of traffic, since that’s specified by the oneway= tag. Does it represent the direction of growing street numbers / mileage? Or perhaps it doesn’t represent anything in particular, besides defining a reference for tags such as incline= ?

Tordanik · 2012-05-04T23:47:39.000Z

pippinu:

Beginner question: what’s the meaning of the direction of a highway, if any? I couldn’t find any information about that in the wiki.

The direction of any way is only relevant where tags such as oneway or incline are present, the meaning of which is based on the way direction. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Way_Direction_Dependent for a (probably incomplete) collection of tags that take way direction into account.