Proposal talk:Key:rural

Better to combine zone:traffic=* with other tags

zone:traffic=* does not need to contain all information to derive the default speed limit. You can think of it as zone:traffic=* setting the base traffic rules, and other tags modifying these traffic rules.

This has already been solved in the Netherlands and the solution is well documented on this wiki (see zone:traffic=NL:rural and zone:traffic=NL:urban). (Yes, in the Netherlands we also have both rural motorways and urban motorways, with different traffic rules, although the latter are rare and limited to short segments).

For your example of rural dual carriageways in Germany, you can combine zone:traffic=DE:rural with dual_carriageway=yes. This is a much better idea than zone:traffic=DE:rural_dual_carriageway, and obsoletes the need for a separate rural=yes.

Other issues with this proposal:

• In traffic regulations, rural is the base case and urban is the special case. The proposed tagging is inverted: it uses yes for the base case and no for the special case.
• There are many other ways to differentiate between urban and rural that are unrelated to traffic rules. In the Netherlands, there are at least four different legal definitions of the built-up area; only one of these four affects traffic rules.
• An important convenience of zone:traffic=* is that it includes the country code, so data consumers can derive all traffic rules from tags alone. This way no GIS queries are needed and this also works better for roads near/on borders.

--JeroenvanderGun (talk) 11:25, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

+1

I see that it is not always completely possible to distinguish between rual and urban based on the tags used so far. But for the purposes you mentioned (default speed limits, lit, sidewalk) you may better use zone:traffic, maxspeed:type, zone:maxspeed, source:maxspeed).

I guess, why people try to get this information from housing density is why the information is simply not captured yet. Also the "residential" area would be a way to map this. --Langläufer (talk) 12:07, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

So clearly it would not be needed in Netherlands.

My comment about Germany was mainly to say that maxspeed:type=DE:rural makes it look like that's all the information you need, but it isn't. Unlike the UK which has GB:nsl_restricted, GB:nsl_single and GB:nsl_dual (and GB:motorway) which cover all possible implicit speed limits. But most other countries do not have this one-to-one mapping.

And still, what to do with differentiating urban motorway from rural motorway, and other such situations? Should new maxspeed:type be invented for all such countries and road types? Better to have some universal way to determine it (whether this proposal or something else).

"the "residential" area would be a way to map this" Right, but then significant processing is needed to determine if a road is in a residential area.

--Arrival-spring (talk) 14:23, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

You are conflating maxspeed:type=* and zone:traffic=* now. maxspeed:type=* gets a separate value for every possible speed limit. zone:traffic=* does not. In the Netherlands, we have 5 different values for maxspeed:type=*, but only 2 for zone:traffic=*.

For a rural motorway in the Netherlands, you can simply use zone:traffic=NL:rural to indicate it's rural and highway=motorway to indicate it's a motorway. (On highway=motorway_link you can use motorway=yes.) The same principle can be used in other countries.

--JeroenvanderGun (talk) 11:01, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Tag is redundant

How would a mapper determine where a road ceases to be "rural"? A common way (at least in Austria, where the new tag is not needed at all) would be to look for the traffic sign for city limit. And if you know its location you can as well tag it, which is the way it often happens. Even if city limit is not mapped, maxspeed=* usually is.

Now, if there is no city limit sign, how could a mapper observe where the city area begins? If there happens to be a corresponding sign or classification of the road, why not tag that instead?

--Wolfbert (talk) 13:26, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

City limit sign if it exists, yes. In countries which make distinction between urban and rural default limits, the same question would apply to drivers. How is a driver to know if they are in urban or rural area?

Maybe Austria has very good maxspeed coverage, but the same is not true for most countries. (Even in the UK, despite good coverage for primary/secondary, by unclassified it's only just over 30%).

How are the city limits mapped though, would it not require significant processing to know which 'side' of a city limit sign a road is? (whether it is inside or outside)

--Arrival-spring (talk) 14:23, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Have you taken a look at boundary=urban? It seems to address a similar problem. Also Road types to tag filters seems useful.

As for processing the city limit sign, there is direction=*, although it's not used often. Some heuristic may be used (e.g. for stop signs, the shortest distance to the next intersection indicates direction). Distance to place nodes, building heatmaps or similar come to mind.

The proposed Tag is very general. If it's just about defaults, let the computer do it. It doesn't cost mapping time, will have full country coverage and be reasonably accurate. If higher quality is desired, map the rules explicitly or with zones as described above. No need to tag millions of road segments individually (which, at usual mapping speed, will never be near complete, so a heuristic is needed anyway).

--Wolfbert (talk) 08:13, 18 June 2023 (UTC)