[Tagging] Opinion on meaning of tracktype, smoothness and surface for routing

[Fernando Trebien]

We can't assume a relationship with road quality but I think we can
assume some approximate relationship with maximum safe speed. No
matter how smooth and well maintained a narrow (say 3m wide) road is,
you can't drive safely at 90kmph on it, specially if it has curves.

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 7:18 PM, David Bannon <dbannon at internode.on.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 15:02 +0100, André Pirard wrote:
>>
>
>>Following a gentle dispute on OSM-talk-be about the class of a
>>particular road, I pointed out without any follow-up  that road
>>classification (primary ... tertiary, as well as national ... local on
>>IGN maps) is very subjective but that the road width is very
>>objective.  Moreover, the width can be very easily measured with JOSM >
> on Bing.
>
> Andre, I guess we can measure the width of a road to a reasonable
> accuracy via sat images. But I am not sure what that tells us. We cannot
> assume a relationship between width and quality of the road can we ? Not
> here in Australia anyway, many of the outback roads that are typical of
> the subject of this discussion are quite wide, wider than some of our
> fancy freeways closer to population centers.
>
> If we wanted to measure vibration I guess we could have a process to
> calibrate individual car's suspension. Maybe something like driving over
> a set of steel pipes of defined size a defined distance apart ?
>
> However, I doubt if we'd achieve anything useful, the sort of roads we
> are talking about are usually quite erratic, smooth sections then
> substantial holes or what ever. You slow down for the holes or you break
> something !  But interesting idea....
>
> David
>
>> Of course, the closely related parameter is speed.
>> Two other optimizing data for routing appear to be readily available:
>> declivity as contour lines and straightness which is computable from
>> the map of the road.
>> I think that the only left parameter (beside varying weather, of
>> course) is what you deal with: surface.
>> Not only "will the car be hopping?" but also "is it slippery?", the
>> latter only as a local condition.
>>
>> If we could find an indisputable value for road surface, we could
>> build a very valuable routing database, probably innovative but
>> unfortunately easy to steal.
>> But could we find an objective measure of the surface?  That is, such
>> that everyone comes the the same value, not subjective.
>>
>> While reading your texts, I've had a crazy idea:  measuring vibration
>> in the car. There are Android vibration measuring programs like
>> Vibration Monitoring.  Alas, car vibration is very much dependent on
>> car suspension.  But would some of us experiment this or another idea
>> and come up with a solution?
>>
>> Wouldn't it be great to organize a well thought out worldwide road
>> quality tagging party?
>>
>> Sadly, traffic restriction tagging is in a miserable state.  People
>> even laugh at me, and that is at themselves, when I talk of GPS.  More
>> of this later, I hope.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> André.
>>
>>
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>
>
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-- 
Fernando Trebien
+55 (51) 9962-5409

"The speed of computer chips doubles every 18 months." (Moore's law)
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