[OSM-newbies] tertiary dirt roads?

James Ewen ve6srv at gmail.com
Tue Nov 24 17:50:07 GMT 2009


On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Thomas Meller <thomas.meller at gmx.net> wrote:

> If the way is usable as an interconnect for main traffic, I would not tag
> it as 'unclassified', at least if it connects towns and alike, and not
> (one or more) single houses. If it makes access to a wide landscape
> possible, I would tag it as tertiary, maybe as unclassified if it's very narrow.

That's where we have a fundamental difference between Europe and
Canada. I can show you hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of
countryside with zero houses let alone towns or villages. The main
reason for access into these areas is for access to natural resources,
such as forestry cutblocks, natural gas wells, oil wells, and mineral
mines. Also as a byproduct of all the traffic in the bush, you'll find
roads accessing hilltops where radio towers and forestry look out
towers are located.

My GPS navigator is designed for the regular motorist, who rarely
leaves the paved roads. It becomes less than useful when out in the
bush because most of these roads are not in the database. The OSM
database, however has just about all of these roads, but the tagging
scheme based on European standards would have us tag them all as
little dirt paths in the bush, when in fact some of the main haul
roads are much larger and better maintained than some of the
government secondary highways.

My opinion is that we tag these major haul roads just below the
secondary highway status, so that they show up on a map with an
importance similar to the level that tertiary roads appear. This would
mean that a user would be able to see that the road exist, and might
make the choice to make the shortcut through the bush on a forestry
road rather than add a couple hundred km of distance by using the
government road network. Obviously things like surface type and
condition would have a bearing, as some people might not appreciate
taking their fancy sports car down a rough gravelled road where huge
logging trucks might throw rocks up into their windshields. If the
information however is obscured do to tagging information not showing
the importance of the road, the user can't make that decision.

James
VE6SRV




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