[Tagging] Track grades

[Jesse Crawford]

Apologies if this is the wrong list, I'm new to the community.

On the wiki talk page for tracktype [1] there is some discussion from
Australians of this property not properly reflecting road usability. Here
in desert New Mexico I am working on significantly improving mapping of
tracks, and I have the same problem. Many tracks here are apparently Grade
1 or 2 as they are made up of well-compacted gravel and exposed bedrock.
However, due to grade or unevenness they are often unsuitable (and unsafe)
for 2WD or low-clearance vehicles. These paths are often quite dangerous to
be stuck on, miles away from the nearest person and beyond phone reception.

It seems that there are properties to express information like evenness,
but they are not taken into account by the standard renderer while the
Grade is. Are there any plans to redefine Grade or create a new property
for use by renderers that directly expresses the usability of a road?

My suggestion would be adding a property (perhaps "suitability") with
values of "2wd" and "4wd," which matches the semantics used by e.g. Forest
Service maps which often show 4WD-only tracks with a different line.

As a second but similar question, off-highway vehicles are a popular
pasttime here and there are many tracks intended for ATVs or dirtbikes, not
wide enough for SUVs. Is there a best practice for tagging these types of
paths?

Thanks!

  [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:tracktype

Jesse B. Crawford
Student, Information Technology
New Mexico Inst. of Mining & Tech

jcrawford at cs.nmt.edu | jesse at jbcrawford.us
http://cs.nmt.edu/~jcrawford | http://jbcrawford.us
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