[OSM-newbies] Abandoned Army Base

[Andy Allan]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Kenneth Pardue <kenneth at pardue.me> wrote:
> Here's one that's a bit of a unique situation.  My local area has an old army base that was abandoned after World War II.  They basically just left all the buildings and roads to fall into disrepair.  It's been 70 years since, but some of the roads are still accessible and used by local traffic.  Most of them are impassible or covered by vegetation.
>
> First off, I've got the area tagged as historic:ruin, landuse:military, and military:abandoned.  Is this correct?  The roads, the ones that are in poor condition but still drivable, that is, I have tagged as access:permissive.  Is this the best way to show that the roads are still accessible, but discourage routers from sending people down them?  And finally, from a potential archaeological standpoint, is it acceptable to trace in the rest of the roads from the old base and tag them with something like disused:yes?  It seems like it would be good to have these roads on the map in some form, even if they're not navigable.  The forestry service owns this land now and there are a number of ATV trails through the area.

The best thing to do is tag what you find on the ground today. So
first off - is it still a military base? If the military no longer
have any involvement in the site, then it's not landuse=military any
more. Similar thinking should be applied to the overgrown roads - if
they are currently "track" status then tag them as highway=track with
an appropriate tracktype - if they are only really a path nowadays
then tag them as that. If the surface is broken up, find an
appropriate surface tag - that would be much more useful to routers
than the access tag, for example.

So in summary, focus on what is there now, rather than what used to
be, and choose your tags based on that.

Cheers,
Andy