Classificator for distinguishing urban from rural roads

[FlorusCiphersmith]

The legal minimum distance for overtaking depends on whether the road is located within or outside a built-up area.
The OpenStreetMap way tag "zone:traffic" basically provides this information. However, it is not used for annotation in many regions. Currently, the distance limit is chosen as 1,5m by default, which is thus wrong often.

The proposed solution is to introduce a hand-crafted or trained binary classifier which predicts from existing way properties such as speed limits whether this is an urban or rural road and annotates ways accordingly. This prediction is always outvoted by the "zone:traffic" tag.

[opatut]

Some stats about the zone:traffic tag: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/zone:traffic#values

It is clear from that list, that

• The current implementation works only in Germany (with the DE: prefixes).
• We've missed a lot of possible tag values. Of course, OSM is a bit messy (since you can put in anything), but at least we should understand a tag like zone:traffic=DE:zone30, which represents about 5% of the used values for this tag, about 7800 times.

When implementing this, try to make it work regardless of the country you're in. Make sure to have some generic fallback, but consider that traffic in France works different from traffic in Germany.

[opatut]

Also compare its global distribution with the alternative maxspeed :)

• https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/zone:traffic#map
• https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/maxspeed#map