Proposal talk:Construction (2010)

Current use of construction=*

The convention (with support in current default renderings) has been to use, for example, highway=construction + construction=primary to state that the road being constructed is a primary road; any other sensible value (from motorway to footway is valid there, too. Providing details of the construction schedule and on a guesstimated effect on traffic is welcome, but if the road is not usable, then that section should then be with highway=construction, or at least with access=no; if blocked only in one direction, then split the lanes still in use into a oneway section of a normal road. Introducing a load of various tags that all try to say that the feature is not usable (disused=*, construction:blocked=*, abandoned=*, dismantled=*, destroyed=*, planned=*, etc. is unmanageable in software, since we can not force any such access defining but newly introduced tags downstream into the various software, which might no longer be maintained actively. Alv 07:05, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

+1 Using construction=yes (or disused=yes, abandoned=yes, etc.) is not backward compatible with all current usage of the data. To a mapper perspective, it looks much simpler, but it would make the data much harder to use, and there are no good points in data almost unuseable sletuffe 13:02, 17 August 2010 (BST)

On completion dates

I agree with Alv that the current construction=* scheme provides all the necessary/useful features of a road under construction. But I think that even the additional information on start/end dates is hardly useful. Estimated completion dates are hardly ever reliable; larger projects can sometimes be off schedule for several years. Also, the "end user" usually does not care much about when a construction was started, but only whether it has been completed yet or not. The projected completion date may, however, be useful to other mappers, in order to check in time whether the construction is done, but for that purpose the information can just as well be put in a note=* or FIXME=* (the latter especially if completion is expected soon). Oli-Wan 16:01, 21 June 2010 (UTC)