[Tagging] highway=track access

[SomeoneElse]

Greg Troxel wrote:
> 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.

Well, ish - but what's important is that all aspects that can be mapped 
(legal, physical, etc.) are.  I'd always apply the "duck test" to 
something to decide between unclassified, service and track, and if 
separate information is available about legal access, add that too.  
Here, for example:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/50733252

is something that has the same legal access as an unclassified road 
(legally it is a road) but physically it's far from it, hence highway=track.

> So the description of "BOAT" sounds very much like highway=unclassified,
> and arguably with physical tags.

No, it's a specific England-and-Wales legal designation that implies 
certain access rules.

> 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.

I don't think that "one patch" is going to cut it here.  What's 
important to one group of map users in one area is very different to 
what's useful to another somewhere else.  The "standard map" style is 
already very fussy in some respects (does "path" really need a separate 
rendering from "footway" et al?), and other maps made with OSM data 
(including Mapquest's and http://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html) tend 
to be a bit less "busy".  Adding more detail makes it more useful to you 
but makes it less useful to someone else.

For me on foot, legal rights-of-way ("designation" in 
England-and-Wales-speak) is what's important, so maps that I create for 
my own use always incorporate that.  You in Vermont would no doubt want 
something different, just as the German community did, and the HOT / 
osm-fr people did.

If you're prepared to (mis)use existing styling elements from the 
current map, you don't even have to touch the map style at all - just 
rewrite the data as it goes into the rendering database (1) (if you're 
talking about a web map) or edit the mappings in the style file (2) (the 
equivalent for a Garmin map).  If you just want Vermont, then based on 
the PBF extract size at Geofabrik, you could probably render all the 
tiles down to a reasonable zoom level and fit it on an SD card on your 
phone, so a small virtual server set up as per (3) sat on a desktop or 
laptop PC is more than capable of handling it.

Cheers,

Andy


1) https://github.com/openstreetmap/osm2pgsql/blob/master/README_lua.md

2) http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap/help/Custom_styles

3) http://switch2osm.org/loading-osm-data/