note= tags aren't machine-readable - so in practice, moving things from a machine-readable tag to a note means that they are practically lost to all consumers.

At the very least, this should have been moved to bridge:structure= rather than a note= .

There is no "list of approved values". Those documented on the wiki are simply "informal standards" (as osm.wiki/Map_Features explains) and removing information like this is discouraged, to put it mildly.

historic:highway=* would be much better than highway=historic. Generally the key should reflect what it is, not what it used to be. It is a historic highway but it's not a highway.

taginfo reports 1,200 historic:highway=* vs just 6 highway=historic.

(railway=abandoned/dismantled is kind of grandfathered in but not a good example to follow!)

'St' is standard British orthography to denote a saint, rather than simply an abbreviation. Please see https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/19609/saint-or-st-is-there-an-official-osm-policy

Hi - great to see the work you've been doing. Please don't remove tiger:reviewed from a road unless you've also verified the road surface - a 'reviewed' residential road would usually be assumed paved unless otherwise tagged. Thanks!

Wow, that's wonderful. Love that sort of little detail.

highway=unclassified, surface=unpaved is ok but slightly unidiomatic for UK mapping. There's nothing wrong with it per se - there are lots of dirt roads in the States mapped that way, for example - but it's slightly unexpected in a UK context where highway=unclassified isn't used by custom for such a road. I wouldn't die on a hill for it either way.

trigpoint's right with the ref though - this should go into official_ref or similar. Otherwise you get the situation where user-facing maps and routing apps tell people to "turn left onto the U3064" to which the obvious answer is "the what?!". It's not really practical to expect every single user-facing app to build in a long list of exceptions for each country (e.g. "never announce C or U refs in the UK").

In general, don't assume a 1:1 mapping between OSM terminology and UK legal terminology - the words are often similar but OSM terms have their own meaning through custom. "ref" doesn't mean "any road number". "unclassified" doesn't mean "any unclassified road". OSM doesn't really do "established and authoritative documented" - we're not that kind of project :) - but this has been hashed out on the talk-gb list several times over the years if you're interested.

Anyway, trivialities aside, thanks for your mapping - great to see your contributions.

cheers
Richard

Thanks. Yikes - that's a horribly out-of-date document and shouldn't be used for anything at all. I'll edit the wiki accordingly.

Could you say which page in particular? There are several contradictory pages on the wiki.

Hi Mike - could I ask why you've deleted this relation? I was out walking in Shropshire the other day and saw clear waymarkers for it.

Hi - if you reclassify roads to highway=residential, could you please make sure you delete the tiger:reviewed=no tag at the same time? Otherwise it looks like the road is unreviewed from the original TIGER import and cannot be relied upon to be a drivable/cyclable road. Thank you.

Hi! Great to see all the work you're doing - especially adding surface tags.

The highway=secondary surprises me a bit - a road like this would usually be tagged highway=unclassified. In developed countries in OSM, highway=secondary is almost always a paved road with a centreline. OSM doesn't use State or Federal Functional Classification systems.

If you'd like to discuss it more widely then the talk-us mailing list is probably the best place to do that - https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/

I was thinking more the really rough TIGER roads around the oilfield - most rural TIGER highway=residentials are an approximation at best, but this bunch is really bad and actively misleading. If all the oilfield roads were deleted, and a few access roads traced afresh, the map would be a lot better. But you're right, the landuse doesn't help!

I'd certainly prefer cycleway=separate. But I can take it to the tagging@ list if you think that'd help.

SK53 has pointed out that sidewalk=separate is frequently used (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/sidewalk=separate, https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues/712, etc.) to indicate "road has a sidewalk, mapped as separate way".

By analogy, cycleway=separate would be good tagging to use in this case.

One feature, one OSM object is a well-established principle: osm.wiki/One_feature,_one_OSM_element

In this case, if you have two representations of the same object (a cycleway), one with a less accurate geometry than the other (i.e. on the road centreline rather than on the actual cycleway), then the user has a 50% chance that the polyline in their turn-by-turn directions will send them up the inaccurate geometry (a busy A road) rather than the accurate one. Which is clearly not a good thing!

By and large you should not expect OSM data (or, indeed, any detailed geodatabase) to be directly consumable for small-scale mapping, but should expect to have to do some generalisation. OSM tends towards completeness and that means the data gets more detailed and less directly consumable for small-scale maps as time goes on.

If you were to create some proprietary tags to represent this scenario in a format more readily consumable by your rendering rules (a la network=xcn in Oxford) then I wouldn't object. I wouldn't even go to the barricades against an _additional_ tag accompanying cycleway=track, to express "the track is mapped separately", though it would be suboptimal and contrary to mapping practice the world over. But having the same feature represented by two different geometries, without any indication that they are the same feature, is not sustainable.

Hi Mike,
That's great - thank you. Went for a walk today and it is still (happily) very much in evidence on the ground, albeit a bit muddy!
All the best
Richard

Hi Mike,

Interested to note your retagging of the D'Arcy Dalton Way with a comment that it's "no longer classified as a long-distance path". It still appears to be signposted round here and the guidebook has just (December) been republished. Can you shed any light?

All the best
Richard

Just because a document doesn't have a copyright notice on it doesn't mean it's uncopyrighted, I'm afraid. Quite the opposite- copyright subsists unless expressly disclaimed.

Second, a document being "accessible" has no bearing on its copyright status.

Third, as SomeoneElse explains, the consensus in the UK is that we do not add C/D/E/F/UX/etc road numbers to the ref tag, but rather to official_ref or somesuch (if they can be legally sourced). The problem with your (rather sweeping) "bad product" assertion is that OSM is an international project and it is not encouraged to unnecessarily add regional exceptions unless there's a compelling reason. ref= means the same thing the world over: let's not add a needless exception for one country.

I can't fault your enthusiasm, but these aren't tracks ("roads for mostly agricultural use, forest tracks etc.; usually unpaved (unsealed) but may apply to paved tracks as well, that are suitable for two-track vehicles, such as tractors or jeeps"), and they're too transitory to map in OSM. Sorry.

Looks great! Should this be network=rcn instead? I think (but might be wrong) it's only the USBRS routes that get network=ncn - osm.wiki/WikiProject_U.S._Bicycle_Route_System