[Tagging] highway=track access

[John F. Eldredge]

I agree that unpaved roads need to be rendered differently than paved roads. In wet weather, particularly in areas with clay soil, unpaved roads may be completely impassable.


On June 4, 2014 6:22:33 PM CDT, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
> 
> SomeoneElse <lists at mail.atownsend.org.uk> writes:
> 
> > Some (but very few) "BOAT"s near me say "service road" to you when
> you
> > look at them; most just say "track" or even "bridleway".  The only
> > "unclassified" ones I can find are as a result of some newbie's*
> > mapping and probably could benefit from a resurvey to see if they're
> > best described as service roads or something else.  I certainly
> > wouldn't use highway=road if I'd been and had a look, as that
> implies
> > that no survey has taken place.
> >
> > Essentially - map the physical and legal attributes separately; but
> > map both as accurately as you can.
> 
> I may be alone in thinking this, but I find the legal Right of Way
> notion to be critical, and an important distinction between
> highway=unclassified and highway=track or highway=service.
> 
> A highway=unclassified is in my view more or less by definition open
> to
> use by the public, even if it's what is in the US a "private way". 
> And
> at least in Massachusetts, such a road is almost always a distinct
> parcel in terms of land ownership (or owned by the town as space
> between
> other parcels).
> 
> A "highway=service" is almost always not a publically-accessible right
> of way, and usually does not have a separate parcel.  It's almost
> always
> access=private, access=customers or access=permissive, and almost
> never
> access=yes.
> 
> Highway=track is legally similar to highway=serice, except that it
> tends
> to be physically much lower quality.
> 
> So the description of "BOAT" sounds very much like
> highway=unclassified,
> and arguably with physical tags.
> 
> I wonder if the definition of service and track should have implicit
> access=permissive as a best-guess default, rather than the access=yes
> associated with unclassified.  (That raises the issue of a way to show
> access=customers as some color other than red or green.)
> 
> Sort of related, there's a long-standing issue that dirt roads (e.g.,
> highway=residential surface=unpaved) do not get rendered differently,
> and this can lead people to wrongly mark them as tracks, when legally
> they are roads.  I suspect that people in all-paved and people in
> zero-paved areas don't see this as important, but I live in a town
> where
> some people live on dirt roards, and was recently in an area of
> Vermont
> where many roads are not paved, and it's a big deal in route planning.
> Perhaps now with carto it's just a question of someone sending a
> patch,
> but it seems like there has been reluctance to render unpaved roads
> differently.
> 
> 
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-- 
John F. Eldredge -- john at jfeldredge.com
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.