Should we make a new line format (maybe resembling the highway=construction line format) for former roads? The three examples I could think of in the US are the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike, the I-44 rerouting near the Creek Turnpike, and US 66. asked 07 Mar '19, 15:32  X99 |
One Answer:
It used to be highway=abandoned, as it still is for railways, but some wiki editor has decided that it should be deprecated for highways (with no link to any discussion) and abandoned: used in front of highway instead. One of your examples uses both to be sure... answered 07 Mar '19, 16:50  EdLoach ♦ |
I can see the logic in moving "abandoned" to a lifecycle tag on the key - so that you can see what sort of highway it was that was abandoned. Personally, I suspect that either tagging should work, because anyone going out of their way to show abandoned highways on a map or otherwise process the data isn't going to just read the wiki; they're going to look at the data in OSM and ask how people have represented that particular feature.
I think the other reasoning on the preference for the lifecycle prefix is that abandoned roads are often still perfectly serviceable as for example: highway=path.