Handling additional surface tag values

[SK53]

A number of surface tag values have increased in usage recently. These take the form of an existing widely used tag value appended with a colon and additional information, for example highway=concrete:plates. The existing CASE statement in hdm.mmd (line 645) fails to recognise these values as good quality roads, as in this examle in the Houston area, where freeways are shown as unpaved: http://osm.org/go/TuQZpzrB?layers=H&way=43017394.

A fairly simple way of handling these additional values would be to change the predicates to be of the form surface like 'concrete%' or surface ~ '^concrete'.

[yohanboniface]

At first read, those sounds like a weird scheming to me.

Shouldn't it be instead something like

surface=concrete
concrete=plates

?

I'm not saying we should not implement your suggestion, just putting the debate on, before hardcoding those scheme choices ;)

[SK53]

Agree completely. Unfortunately the surface=concrete:plates has 10000+ instances whereas the more easily consumed and consistent concrete=plates has just over 10!

[yohanboniface]

Humm, I've mixed feelings, in a hand usage should be followed; in the other hand, bad schemes should be avoided before they become wide. I'm not sure here if we are still in time to ignore this value, or if the game is already over :s