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Lets say a continuous single road stretches for 10 miles but along the way crosses over three bridges, two roads that cross underneath and the third is a stream passing underneath. As a human, I consider that one 10-mile long road that happens to cross three bridges, so I wan to join all segments of this road on Potlatch2. But unless I'm missing something, the only way to make bridges in OSM (or at least Potlatch2) is to cut that continuous 10 mile road into four segments, with three short bridges of the exact same name between each segment. Is that correct? Or is there some way that would allow me to maintain the single continuous road while still adding bridges.

Thanks.

asked 25 Sep '12, 06:02

gopanthers's gravatar image

gopanthers
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Dear Gopanthers, Yes, but dont cut the road into pieces before you tagged or mapped it completely. Otherwise you do have a lot of extra work to do by mapping and tagging all the pieces. And dont forget to change the three bridges again separatly. Keep mapping Hendrik

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answered 25 Sep '12, 16:37

Hendrikklaas's gravatar image

Hendrikklaas
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You ask "is there some way that would allow me to maintain the single continuous road?". No, and there shouldn't be.

A "road" is just one way of looking at a way. One collection of streets might have the same name, sure. But another collection might have the same road number. Another collection might be a cycle route. And so on.

Just because motoring priority remains the same for 10 miles, that doesn't give any special significance in OSM. Applications (such as car satnavs) that want to postprocess the data can do so - so, for example, the lack of turns and maybe a consistent name in this 10-mile stretch would mean that the satnav doesn't say "turn off" at any point.

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answered 25 Sep '12, 09:35

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Richard ♦
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You are correct. Whenever the properties of a way change, a new way has to be created; and since we record the bridge as a property of the way, ways need to be split at bridges.

There's a proposed relation for bridges however even that will probably require splitting the way. And there's the option of collecting all the individual bits of your 10 mile road into a named route using the route relation but that is not normally used for plain roads.

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answered 25 Sep '12, 07:50

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Frederik Ramm ♦
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question asked: 25 Sep '12, 06:02

question was seen: 3,831 times

last updated: 25 Sep '12, 16:37

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum