Proposal:Key:rural
| Key:rural | |
|---|---|
| Proposal status: | Canceled (inactive) |
| Proposed by: | Arrival-spring |
| Tagging: | rural=* |
| Applies to: | 
|
| Definition: | Whether or not a road is rural, when certain legal conditions change |
| Statistics: |
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| Rendered as: | Not rendered, to be used mainly in routing |
| Draft started: | 2023-06-16 |
| RFC start: | 2023-06-16 |
Proposal
The rural=yes/no tag is placed on roads to denote whether or not they are in a rural area, where there are no other tags which explicitly give this information.
Rationale
There is no easy way to reliably determine if roads are in rural or urban areas. Some people have tried to use residential landuse or building density to make a best guess, but that is all it is and it requires a lot of pre-processing.
Knowing if a road is urban or rural is important for default speed limits in many countries, where this is one of the things that affects the default speed limit.
It could also be useful for implying other tags where these are not tagged explicitly, e.g. in some countries rural roads would be expected not to be lit and not to have sidewalks.
Relation to speed limit tags
source:maxspeed, maxspeed:type, zone:maxspeed and zone:traffic exist and all can have values such as DE:rural. So why do we need another tag for denoting a rural road?
If a road already has one of these tagged with XX:rural then rural=yes does not need to be added, similarly for XX:urban and rural=no.
Also,
- Speed limit tags imply more accuracy than there really is. e.g. in Germany there are not just urban and rural roads, as established tagging might suggest, but also subcategories (
rural dual carriagewayandrural road with 2 or more lanes in each direction). The same is true in many other regions, soDE:ruralis not actually sufficient to determine the default speed limit. - Some people consider these keys to be mutually exclusive, and so if a rural road had a signed speed limit then could it have both
source:maxspeed=signandzone:traffic=DE:rural? - Some roads are in multiple categories, e.g. in Guatemala (and other countries) there are different default limits for urban motorways and rural motorways, should they be tagged with
GT:ruralorGT:motorway? - This tag is not only about speed limits (zone:traffic claims not to be either, but would still have the problem in the above bullet point).
Tagging
rural=yes the road is in a rural area, so rural rules apply
rural=no the road is in an urban area, so urban rules apply
It is not suggested to tag this on every road, but only in countries/regions where such distinction makes sense and where there is no other tagging to determine it. i.e. If a road already has DE:urban it would not also need rural=no.
Keys already in use are rural, urban and rural_urban. rural was chosen as it has the most use.
Features/Pages affected
Mention it on the pages of:
External discussions
Forum RFC: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/rfc-feature-proposal-rural/100195
Comments
Please comment on the discussion page.