<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 2:57 PM Richard Fairhurst <<a href="mailto:richard@systemed.net">richard@systemed.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<div dir="auto">Kevin Kenny wrote:
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<div dir="auto">> Routers tend to get it right, since most of their algorithms </div>
<div dir="auto">> disfavor service roads and penalize tracks severely. Essentially, </div>
<div dir="auto">> you'll get routed over either only if they go to your destination.</div>
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<div dir="auto">That's a rather car-centric attitude!</div>
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<div dir="auto">Having useful data for highway=track would be really helpful in bike routing, particularly for those of us who ride steel rather than carbon fibre! <span>There's a burgeoning industry of "gravel/adventure" bikes for people who enjoy off-road riding but without all the technical malarkey associated with MTBs.</span></div>
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<div dir="auto">As it stands, for <a href="http://cycle.travel" target="_blank">cycle.travel</a>'s routing, I ignore highway=track in the US by default unless there's another useful signifier - a surface tag, a route relation, or similar. Contrast that to mainland Europe, where <a href="http://cycle.travel" target="_blank">cycle.travel</a> will happily route over highway=track because the data is much more reliable.</div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Not car-centric at all! 'A router' says nothing about whether it's routing for car, bicycle, pedestrian, or horse. The rules for what ways are suitable differ, but routing is routing. "Find me a way to get from here to there that is optimal according to some metric and satisfies some set of constraints."</div><div><br></div><div>I'm actually making the argument, somewhat obliquely, that I'm having trouble discerning very many purposes for which the current definition of `highway=track` is fit. `highway=track`, I have been told repeatedly and firmly on this list, refers only to the purpose of the road. Whether a way comprises two ruts or tar-macadam ten metres wide, it's a track if its purpose is agriculture or logging. If I discover that someone has a shale pit, it has to become `highway=service`. Likewise, if I find out that there's a cabin in there somewhere, it's now `highway=service service=driveway`. If there are *two* cabins there, belonging to different establishments, now it's `highway=residential`. In no case is anything asserted about rideability, driveability, access, or surface characteristics. </div><div><br></div><div>It tends to be Europeans who are sticklers for the rule that `highway=track` refers only to purpose. I don't hear that nearly as often from this side of the pond, so I don't think the tagging issue is specifically an American problem. One difference in the US is that we have a lot more relatively empty space, and so we have a lot more poor-condition tracks that are not fit for riding, don't get snow removal, and have the brush cleared only when the forester needs to get in with more than an ATV. That's not a problem with the map, it's a problem with the territory. The things are built for, and get used by, off-road vehicles, be they jeeps, tractors, snowmobiles, or logging trucks. There isn't a classification below 'track'. Our tracks are simply often not well maintained.</div><div><br></div><div>I therefore argue that calling something `highway=track` based on field observation until and unless the purpose of the road is known is mostly harmless. The definition of 'track' that is based solely on purpose is not terribly useful for routing decisions, be it a gravel grinder, a car, an ATV, a hiker, a snowmobile, or a mule. It's also a definition that makes things difficult for a rural mapper to map in a forested area, since the portion of the way that's been surveyed may not be informative about its ultimate purpose - without traveling the entire length of the way, it may not be possible to identify what to put in `highway=*`. And it makes only fairly trivial differences to rendering. For most intents and purposes, a track, a service way, or a rural residential way are equivalent.</div><div><br></div><div>Perhaps the issue among that list that troubles me the most is the difficulty of choosing `highway=*` for the two tire tracks that disappear out of sight into the woods. I've mentioned that before, on this mailing list and on "tagging", and the consensus of the replies appears to have been that if I don't know the ultimate purpose for that poor road, I shouldn't map it at all! That strikes me as a ridiculous extreme. I know the surface, smoothness, tracktype, and so on of the portion that I've explored. I know that it's useful to hikers, cyclists, equestrians, snowmobilists, whatever, along the portion I've traveled. I know its alignment. But I can't map it because I don't know why it was put there? Really? `highway=track` at least asserts that the road is there, and I argue that it's a perfectly fine placeholder until and unless there's better information. (And I don't personally consider collecting that information to be a particularly urgent task - the distinction is not likely to affect anyone's life in the slightest.)</div><div><br></div><div>This is a more general pet peeve of mine. If a tagging scheme requires me to do research beyond the characteristics that I can observe in the field on a mapping trip, that's a bad tagging scheme. </div><div><br></div><div>I have yet to see a convincing reply to the question: "What would a data consumer want to know, that would be informed by the distinction among 'track', 'residential', 'service' and possibly even 'unclassified' as applied to relatively unimproved rural roads?" The answers tend to be dismissive ones like "we care about reality." (With the implication that I don't care about it?) What is so important about the road's purpose that makes people go so far as to say it shouldn't be mapped until and unless that information is known?</div><div><br></div><div>I do try to make it a practice to tag surface, tracktype, smoothness and sac_scale when I'm mapping a track, path, or footway. I don't tag mtb_scale because I don't have the specialized knowledge to grade a MTB track correctly. (Being a hiker, I'm a lot more confident about sac_scale.) I also am pretty careful to map surface, smoothness, tracktype on roads of higher classification (typically unclassified or tertiary) if it's poorer than the highway class would lead one to expect. There are some `surface=compacted smoothness=bad` tertiary roads out in the countryside around here. But around here, data out in the woods are pretty certain always to be stale. It simply comes from having such a low population density. There's only so much ground that a mapper can cover. When I happen to go somewhere, I update the map of where I've been. I can't assert more about the data quality except that it'll be pretty good until the next washout or blowdown, and I don't know when I'll be back to the spot to observe it again.</div><div><br></div><div>(Feel free to stop reading here, because I'm repeating a point I've made many times...) For the scale of the problem: The Northeast is the most densely populated part of the US. Even in the densely-populated Northeastern states, we have some huge areas of unsettled land. The Adirondack Park has a land area comparable to that of Belgium, and a population of about 100,000. There is no cellular service or broadband connectivity in most of that region Even satellite service can be problematic unless trees that obstruct the antenna can be cleared. Other infrastructure is equally primitive. There are no geeks, because there are no geek jobs. You're not going to build a huge online mapping community in an area like that. What little mapping gets done is done by crazy geek adventure-tourists like me who enjoy getting up that way. We're few. And this is the Northeast. The 'fly-over country' has those problems in spades. </div></div><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature">73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin</div></div>