Proposal:Highway key voting importance

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Latest comment: 16 years ago by Dieterdreist in topic Voting
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Highway key voting importance
v · d
Proposal status: Approved (active)
Proposed by: Dieterdreist
Tagging: highway=*
Applies to: way
Definition: Change the meaning of the highway tag
Statistics:

Rendered as: Lines
Draft started: 2009-08-27
RFC start: 2009-09-16
Vote start: 2009-08-27
Vote end: 2009-09-30
Picture from Wikimedia Commons, taken by Jawed Karim, licensed cc-by-sa 3.0

Summary

In short the general definition of highway=* should be changed to importance for the road grid (hierarchical position in the interconnecting network) instead of physical attributes.

Longer Version

After continuous discussions on talk and talk-de about the general meaning of the Key highway=*, it was agreed, that the definition pasted onto the wiki in 2007, without discussion on the mailing lists (the main channel of communication within OSM), did not reflect the actual meaning of the key and is posing a lot of problems, especially in the context of a world-map.

Therefore the page was changed after discussions to reflect the common practise better and achieve a more generic definition appliable in all contexts.

In short the definition of highway=* should be changed to importance for the road grid/network instead of physical attributes. This does not mean not to tag physical attributes, they are very important for a lot of reasons. Therefore the proposed changes also include references to the most important physical attributes to add: lanes=*, surface=*, width=*.

Reasoning

This voting is set up because each of the members of the OSM 'family' deeply respects the opinions of their colleagues and so wouldn't want to make major changes to one of the most-used keys - especially changes that have proved controversial - without going through as 'democratic' and open a process as possible. For details see: history of Key:highway

The changes were following a discussion announced here: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-July/039211.html (please see followups to keep track, continued also here: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-August/039444.html )

Changes in detail

changes to Key:highway on 2009-08-06 by Dieterdreist

Discussion

please use the mailing lists and the discussion page

Voting

Latest comment: 16 years ago127 comments123 people in discussion
The importance is generally defined by some local or national authority/government. Smsm1 07:48, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes and No I disagree with the need, at this stage, of this vote. I agree that it is rather unclear the meaning of trunk/primary/secondary/tertiary outside U.K., but we shoud clarify and agree, at internatonal level, how to define the "importance" of a road and then the rules to apply for the road tagging decision. The importance of a road should not be the feeling of a single person. This discussion should be done before the vote and the discussion should involve as many mappers as possible. --GPS-Marco. 28 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes highway=* has always been about the importance of the road, and never about anything physical. --Hawke 12:27, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
  • No The Highway tags match the road classification scheme in the UK. It fits there. In other country it does not fit and has been used differently. That is ok. But it is stupid to bring this back into the UK and change the original meaning. And yes to the necessity of a general discussion before changing something this basic. --Nop 12:38, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes We already do this in Italy, at least for primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified and residential--Stemby 11:28, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes And is to clearly specify that importance is not necessarily correlated with administrative classification. We don't care about who pays to fill the holes in the asphalt. --Alessioz 16:37, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --ilrobi 142:54, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • No This change would invalidate existing data. Introduce new tagging scheme for importance. --Blaz 14:23, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • No This is so far-reaching a proposal that I do not believe that the existing mechamisms of "voting" via the wiki etc. suffice. There are very major implications for existing tagging. Also the existing scheme is well-matured and works well in the UK - and I would have thought the equivalence tables would make it work equally well in most countries. And the whole discussion seems really only to concern certain values of highway=*. As I understand it, even the proposer states that the changes don't really apply to values other than =trunk, =primary, =secondary, =tertiary, =unclassified and =residential. So would it not be better to discuss modifications to these tags (if necessary - personally I think not much) rather than to change the whole key. If there really is a high participation in the vote - and an outcome that it is not close to unanimous one way or the other then I would prefer to see a working party or expert group - as previously discussed in the talk pages. Mikh43 16:01, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes Only because it seems less wrong than physical. I think a short paragraph summing up the factors involved and then points people to International equivalence and a separate page with what to do if your country isn't on there would be best. --Pobice 16:49, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes The established highway tag does not adequately imply build quality, but does map rather well to many countries' hierarchy of road "importances". Physical characteristics of roads as well as usage restrictions (and even smoothness...) can be catered for very well by other tags most of which are already established. An importance-driven presentation of roads furthermore corresponds well to how most existing road maps present roads and allows users to more readily visualise a long-distance route. --Mackerski 22:29, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --tosky 15:09, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes I don't think "physical" matches what people do (for trunk/primary/secondary/tertiary/unclassified), so the main page should indeed be rewritten around "importance", but with appropriate reference to the fact that physical is relevant for other values, and that actual usage in each country is generally established in the international equivalence table. The main entry should set the scene, not try to give precise definitions of everything.--RichardMann 13:11, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I approve this proposal I approve this proposal. --Yuri Nazarov 12:47, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --Ivan Komarov 08:54, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --Aleksandr Dezhin 11:42, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --Simone 14:25, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --Diego.guidotti 16:38, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I veto this proposal -- Randomjunk 09:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --Dieterdreist 07:42, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I approve this proposal I approve this proposal. we already do this in Spain --PerroVerd 07:57, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes --D.s.e 08:08, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes xylome 08:11, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • No: too unspecific an alternative. Ipofanes 08:13, 16 September 2009 (UTC)--
  • Yes --Hanska 08:14, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • No I agree with Mikh43 -- Gustavf 08:21, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes Snusmumriken 08:29, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes DaveFX 08:36, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • No. This will invalidate a lot of existing data and the meaning of value under the new definition doesn't seem clear. In addition we have clearly defined motorways, trunk, primary and secondary in the UK which will be lost. I could support a new key to achieve this objective either via say "Importance" (to define importance) or "LegalDef" (to take over from highway for roads with a certain legal status thereby freeing up Highway for this purpose). --MarkS 08:51, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
No-one is suggesting changing established country based classifications, also the distinction between trunk, primary, secondary and tertiary roads in the UK is already effectively based on importance. --Wynndale 11:38, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
I think a serious problem of both this proposal, and the existing text at the top of Key:highway, it that neither make this point clear. We actually use government classifications mostly -- Harry Wood 14:19, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
I guess you are kidding? what else do you want? This page was linked from the highway page. There was announcements on the talk-list and I asked the readers to fwd. to their local mailing lists as well. Do you think I have nothing better to do than deal with your complaints? Why didn't YOU put it yourself to some other fancy wikipage? -- Dieterdreist 22:30, 7 October 2009 (UTC)


Voting results

  • 93 votes yes
  • 35 votes different (no, yes and no, veto, abstain, teapot, ...)

(counted once, probably there is some mistake, but the overall result will not change)

Please note that voting was finished by 30th September 2009!

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