[OSM-newbies] 'Unpaved' and 'Unsurfaced' road tags

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi,

> I've been mapping for about a year now in a tropical country, namely Sri
> Lanka.
> Problem : a lot of the smaller residential roads are so altered by the
> monsoon weather that you can hardly drive on them, there are more holes
> and ditches than proper surfaced road ? However most of these roads used
> to be surfaced (either with tar or concrete) a few years back.
>
> How should I tag these? Here are the different options I found  :
> 1. mark these roads as : highway='residential' AND surface='unpaved',
> 2. highway='unsurfaced'
> 3. highway='track' and tracktype='grade1' or 'grade2'
>
> of course, with option 2 and 3 we loose the residential tag , which is
> the most interesting property of the road, according to me.
>
> Has anybody faced these choices elsewhere ? I would be very interested
> by your feedback.

IMO the best choice would be to keep the highway=residential tag as it 
describes the most important property of this piece of the network. 
Additionally, I'd add a surface tag. If unpaved is not the best option, I'd 
simply use/invent one for later use. I usually use surface=paved|copperstone|
gravel|unpaved|grass|ground. Thoise are neither "official" nor proposed tags. 
But if you want to add the information to the osm database right now (and 
obviously you want to :) just use the tags you like.

Best regards,

ce