[Tagging] highway=track access

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

On 2014-05-19 at 19:05:30 +0100, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> There are almost 8m highway=track objects in the database (thanks taginfo!),
> third only to =residential and =service (thanks TIGER!).
> 
> I'm interested to know what level of access people believe this implies in
> their home countries.

In Italy if I saw a track I would assume that unless there is 
a sign or a gate I would be legally allowed to drive on it, 
but I would probably have no reason to do it, since it would 
only lead to farms or woods, and even if it wasn't a dead end 
there would be a better road to the same destination.

There are lots of tracks that do have signs and gates preventing 
access to the general public, probably more than other types of 
highway (except maybe residential) but in that case I would expect 
this to be specified on OSM with proper access tags

As for routing, the consequence of all this is that I would 
expect tracks to be considered for routing (if access keys allows it) 
but only at a very low priority.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''