It’s great to have new cycle mappers on board but -

Wow. No. Please don’t do that.

Making up new values such as “compulsory” and “facultative” will mean that routing software and renderers have no idea how to treat your data.

In addition, tag values should generally be commonly-understood British English where possible, and “facultative” certainly isn’t that.

Please use the tagging@ mailing list to discuss your ideas for tagging before arbitrarily changing data. Please also revert your changes. Thanks.

Surely Wikimania should be considered a fringe event of the much more important OSM 10th Birthday party!

Brilliant!

Pretty much any kind of relation is not easily approachable for a newcomer.

If that’s the case, then that’s a UI issue in the editors, and eminently fixable. The correct approach is to improve the editors.

Friendly advice: your consistent shouting, boldcase and headline font in all this is seriously detracting from the points of your message, especially when you’re yelling at people who have more OSM experience than you do. Please calm down a little.

The route relation which gets the tag is what matters. Which is also my main argument why this is something that newcomers won’t be able to easily map.

There is no reason why routes should be difficult to map.

Put yourself in the shoes of a newcomer. All the roads in their town are mapped. The corner shop is mapped. The church is mapped. The pubs are mapped. But the bus routes aren’t and the bus stop isn’t.

Why should we say “sorry, churches are easy to map, but bus routes aren’t”? What sort of message is that to send out?

It is incumbent on people “designing” tagging schemes to make them approachable for the newcomer. If the scheme fails that test, it isn’t fit for purpose. Your insistence that the public_transport tagging isn’t suitable for newcomers is leading me to think it should be dropped entirely and replaced with something saner.

Why is a bus stop something that has to be easy for newcomers to tag?

Eating less spam is another good way to lose weight.

“Experts in biotech and antibody consultancy”

“Unfortunately a bit shit at spamming”

Still flooded:

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/34681.aspx?area=112FWFEAS10A&page=1&type=Region&term=Southwest

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/34681.aspx?area=112FWFSAL10A&page=1&type=Region&term=Southwest

But I do agree with the general point that OSM is not for transient events.

cycle.travel abbreviates “Street” and “Road”, and uses a condensed font for street names. But then I’m a “old paper street atlas” cartographer at heart!

http://cycle.travel/map?lat=51.5183&lon=-0.1056&zoom=16

As usual the wiki is full of nonsense! There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t use highway=footway for a mountain trail.

That is not wrong. highway=footway simply means “a path which is primarily intended for walking”. You can use it with sac_scale=hiking if you like, or indeed a surface= tag.

I’m not sure that the problem here is “The hazard of relying on commercial implementations”, more “The hazard of relying on CloudMade”. It’s not necessarily endemic.

Aaaaaand done: highway=*

Sigh, another badly worded wiki page.

The intent of the highway= tag has always been that the tags represent each road’s importance in its nation’s road system, with the hierarchy trunk->primary->secondary->tertiary->unclassified.

There are also a few “special” values: highway=motorway (a restricted access fast road), highway=residential (a sub-unclassified road for residential access), highway=service (a sub-unclassified road for non-residential access), and so on. But the trunk->unclassified hierarchy covers most of it.

This is 100% applicable to any other country, and indeed the wiki page says this - “The highway type helps indicate the importance of the highway within the road network as a whole” - but, in the way of wiki pages, has accumulated a bunch of cruft which serves mostly to confuse people. We just need to sort the cruft out, rather than implementing a whole “new set of standards”, I think.

Nice work!

“don’t rely only on Google Maps when checking street names”

Don’t rely ever on Google Maps when checking street names. Don’t even think about using it. It’s a copyrighted source, and OSM contributors aren’t allowed to use it - that’s part of the contributor agreement when you create your account.

Surfaces on paths and tracks. A highway=footway or highway=bridleway could be anything. For walkers and (especially) cyclists, a well-chosen surface= tag makes a huge difference.

“I really fail to see why these are not rendered”

Because you haven’t submitted a good patch. Where do you think the rendering rules come from otherwise, magic stylesheet fairies?

You can load shapefiles into Potlatch 2.