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Well said Kevin. The information that the typical consumer wants
to know is <br>
<ul>
<li>can I drive this in a low clearance car, a Rav4, or do I need
a high clearance 4wd?</li>
<li>can I ride this on my road bike, my gravel bike, or should I
take the mtn bike?</li>
<li>can I ride this on my harley, my heavy adventure bike, or
should I take the dirt bike?</li>
</ul>
The highway tags alone really don't specify this. In the US we can
guess that roads equal to or better than tertiary are pretty good.
The other roads really require surface and smoothness in order to
have any idea what to expect. Around here tracktype is not very
helpful.<br>
<br>
Richard F: Yes, in general, you shouldn't route a gravel biker on a
track (or service, residential, unclassified) without more
information. <br>
<br>
Brad<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/24/21 9:39 AM, Kevin Kenny wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 2:57
PM Richard Fairhurst <<a
href="mailto:richard@systemed.net" moz-do-not-send="true">richard@systemed.net</a>>
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="auto">Kevin Kenny wrote:
<div dir="auto">
<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>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">That's a rather car-centric
attitude!</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<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>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">As it stands, for <a
href="http://cycle.travel" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">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"
moz-do-not-send="true">cycle.travel</a> will
happily route over highway=track because the data
is much more reliable.</div>
</div>
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<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>
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