Render highway=road like highway=unclassified

[matthijsmelissen]

Current rendering of highway_road is ugly.
This PR causes highway_road to render in the same style as highway_unclassified.

This PR depends on #382.

[lest69]

Sorry, this doesn't make any sense to me. highway=road represents a road for which the classification is unknown. It could be anything from an unpaved track to a motorway, so rendering it the same as residential/unclassified will often be giving it an incorrect level of importance, be it too high or too low. If the current look is ugly, another style can be used, but it should be different from every other defined classification to prevent it from being assumed to be of a specific classification.

[Rovastar]

Yeah I agree.
It should not be the same rendering as unclassified

[matthijsmelissen]

Thank you for reviewing the pull request.

I know it is controversial, so feel free to ignore it. No other pull request depends on it.

That said, I have the impression that we try to represent too much information on the map. I don't think any non-osm map I have seen has so many road styles as ours. That makes our map rather hard to read. I am also not sure if the casual map-user is able to distill the meaning 'a road that might be of any importance' from the current rendering.

highway=road is mainly used in the developing world where people have been tracing from imagery but little on the ground mapping is done, right? What do you think would be the best way to render such roads?

Does someone has an example of places where highway=road is frequently used?

Mapquest Open also renders highway=road as unclassified. The default Cloudmade tiles don't render it at all.

[matkoniecz]

"It could be anything from an unpaved track to a motorway" is probably untrue, even on the worst aerial images motorways are recognisable as motorways.

In all situations where I used/encountered this tagging displaying it as unclassified would be OK (I map Poland).

I think that special "fixme" type display should not be used and displaying it as unclassified is a good idea.

[matthijsmelissen]

For the record, in Luxembourg, displaying it as unclassified would also be fine (all roads higher than unclassified/residential are tagged already).

I'm not sure if motorways are always recognizable as motorways though. In Africa, where only satellite imagery is available, you often only see there there is 'some kind of line'. Only when higher resolution imagery becomes available, you can determine if it is a motorway road or something lower (or an oil pipeline, as I also saw quite often...).

Perhaps it would be useful if someone who is active in Africa/Southern America could chime in.

[pnorman]

highway=road could easily be a highway=residential, highway=living_street, highway=service, highway=unclassified, highway=tertiary, highway=secondary, or highway=primary. It's not restricted to the developing world, you'll find it wherever there is mapping being done remotely by people who can't be certain of the classification from afar.

[dieterdreist]

Am 07/mar/2014 um 12:26 schrieb math1985 [email protected]:

highway=road is mainly used in the developing world where people have been tracing from imagery but little on the ground mapping is done, right? What do you think would be the best way to render such roads?

this is a kind of fix me and should be rendered differently than the other road styles, if a map is not directed towards mappers it might also be the best option not to display highway= road at all, definitely should not create the impression that it is a synonym
for unclassified.

[gravitystorm]

I'm with the dissenters on this one - highway=road is a todo, and so it shouldn't look the same as a particular classification.