Hi AndlessRoumdabout,
You bring up a lot of things here, let me see if I can clarify some of them.
Many of us here have a programming background, and we are not denying that issues exist.
You are correct, no matter how many times a tag has been used - there could still exist better or more correct ways of doing it.
This forum however have a very small amount of mappers, and changing well used tags seems to be out of our league. If you want to change the general tagging scheme, then you should bring it up on the tagging mailinglist.
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
Exactly, and this is why we shouldn’t start to use residential=alley instead of service=alley - doing that will just add even more code and conditions to the renderes, routers and other tools out there.
I can’t talk for all renders and other tools out there, but for Mapnik you can take a look at CartoCSS. Here is the stylesheets for roads:
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/roads.mss
I am not sure this is the exact stylesheet being used, but either way it will still give you an idea about how Mapnik handles tags.
If you were to add the tag residential=alley, the tag would simply be ignored as no style matches.
Now let me get back to your argument about service=alley vs residential=alley, you believe the latter is better. I believe that is because you deep down know that this is not a service road and is only for residential use. From a software perspective though, try to look at it this way.
A stupid renderer that only looks at the main tag (service/residential) would probably render the alley as a service road, which is usually is rendered smaller than a residential road. This seems behaviour actually seems correct.
A stupid routing engine that only looks at the main tag would give higher priority to residential roads compared to service roads, which is again correct. We don’t want to go down small alleys when bigger residential roads are available.
I don’t know which solution is most correct, and I don’t really have to. I’ll look at what the most well mapped and successful areas are doing, and I copy their behaviour. If something is really awful, it will be brought up and discussed - and in the end tagging standards will be updated.
I believe that highway=alley might make more sense, but I guess there is a benefit in keeping the main set of tags down.
You are both right and wrong, but that goes for all of us. The important part is communication and trying to find working solutions.
Yes, Russ McD mistakenly added a bunch of service roads in residential areas. Feel free to update them to either residential, alleys or whatever fits the best. Be careful though, a few of them are actual service roads.
Does any of these answers make sense to you, or do you feel I completely miss the point?
Best Regards,
Johanny Carlson aka Johnny Carlsen