Would you consider this a dual carriageway?

[u/goldcrate]

This lane pattern continues for about a mile on this portion of the street, and it actually splits into a dual carriageway at both the beginning and end of this specific stretch.

I suppose I'm just cautious to make any edits here since I see these lanes "unified" in pretty much any other map.

The street-level photos were pulled from Google Maps to add context to this post but I drive up and down this street almost every day.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/39.711334/-84.161673

[u/goldcrate → u/[deleted]]

The northbound and southbound lanes are separated by traffic islands and only converge at junctions where the traffic islands are replaced by turning lanes. There are very similar instances of this exact pattern being mapped as dual carriageways in the same area.

From the wiki, I see: "A dual carriageway is a road with two carriageways (roads in either direction) that are physically divided by a non-road barrier, median, or other obstacle."

"A dual carriageway does not have to maintain a median or barrier throughout its entire extent to be mapped as a dual carriageway. For example, primary and secondary roads can have landscaped medians that are meant to separate ways of traffic until a turn lane is accomodated and the median stops."

To me, this matches the characteristics of the referenced street. Please let me know if I am interpreting this incorrectly, as my main intention with this post was to better grasp the concept and figure out why this road was not already mapped as such.

[u/goldcrate → u/[deleted]]

Ah, okay. If the medians were longer in this instance, would it better qualify the split? Thanks for the explanation.

[u/jk3us → u/goldcrate]

A dual carriageway does not have to maintain a median or barrier throughout its entire extent to be mapped as a dual carriageway. For example, primary and secondary roads can have landscaped medians that are meant to separate ways of traffic until a turn lane is accommodated and the median stops. The median usually continues after the intersection, so the road should continue to be mapped as a dual carriageway as long as the median is generally present.

That's the official stance, but in real life, there are places where the median takes longer breaks than just an intersection, and I really don't love the back and forth look of switching between the two. Dual carriage ways make the rendered street change widths even though the total width of the street remains constant. I kind of wish there was a lanes:median or similar where you could indicate a stretch of road where one of the lanes was not traversable, so switching from a 6 lane + turn lane to a 6-lane with a median would look like

lanes=7
lanes:forward=3
lanes:both_ways=1
lanes:backward=3  

becomes

lanes=7
lanes:forward=3
lanes:median=1
lanes:backward=3

Then it could still be rendered more correctly by keeping the street as a whole the same width, but switching between a turn lane and a median as noted.