[OSM-newbies] tertiary dirt roads?

[James Ewen]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> If it's a private road, I'm less inclined to call it a tertiary.
> "unclassified" doesn't sound bad in this case.
>
> Given that the primary, secondary and tertiary designations belong to
> the national, state and county/city/forest service/BIA/other
> subordinate systems by default, I'm generally disinclined to consider
> any private road as a tertiary or higher unless it's got a real
> reference number

Okay, so above, you would consider a forest service road as tertiary.
The roads that I am talking about are forest service roads. They just
are built and maintained by the companies that work in the area,
rather than the government. If these companies want access back into
the bush to drag trees out, it is up to them to build and maintain the
access roads.

I'm trying to find an equivalent road using Google Street view, but
it's a little challenging...

Here's a link to a road through the bush near Salem, Or.
http://tinyurl.com/yjh7xgw

This is a paved 2 lane road. If you were to double the width of this
road, straighten it out,  and change the surface to gravel, you'd have
something similar to what I am talking about.



Here's a link to a smaller road that takes you from the government
road grid up to the top of Whitecourt Mountain where there's a
forestry lookout tower, and also a bunch of radio towers.
http://tinyurl.com/y9notsa

Here's a link to a paved road in the bush in Oregon.
http://tinyurl.com/yhpd4xw

Both are at the same zoom level. The smaller road in Alberta is larger
and easier to see from the air than the one in Oregon.

Here's the Oregon area in OSM...
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=45.156&lon=-123.5106&zoom=15

SW Gilbert Creek Road is tagged as a track... a paved striped roadway!

Zoom in and out using Google maps... you'll see some of the main
roadways, ones that you could travel long distances between far flung
towns upon still show when zoomed out, making the map useful for
planning a route. If all the roads are tagged as tiny little trails in
the bush, the road map information becomes useless.


> I'm not quite certain what you're going for...

I'm going for creating a map database that would be useful for people
travelling in the area. I can turn off of a government highway, and
drive for 2 hours on private roads, popping out onto another
government highway 100 miles away. I can do this using maps that
depict these private roads in such a way that I can easily pick out
roads that go between the places I want to go. I can also look at a
tighter zoom level map to see the minor roads that will take me to the
intermediate destination, such as a radio tower on a hilltop somewhere
between those two government highways. Try planning a route where
you're either looking at a blank page, or having to look at a super
detailed map of perhaps 10 square miles.

Try planning your route between Salem and Corvalis but you'll have to
do it at zoom level 14 on OSM, and pretend that all the roads are
residential, where they are all white, including the primary highways,
and motorways. How long would it take you to figure out the route to
take between the two cities? Would you be able to pick the fastest and
best quality roads?

I am talking about setting road tags to help people understand the
road network. The tags may not exactly match the descriptors on the
OSM wiki, but I don't like in the UK...

James
VE6SRV