[Tagging] Current status of the key smoothness=*

[Kytömaa Lauri]

Jan van Bekkum wrote: 
>There are two fundamental approaches to this and I believe that in this discussion the two are mixed:
> 1.  The physical status of the road is described 
> 2.  The tagger determines how hard it will be to use 

Over the years, I've seen the different assessment ideas and tagging ideas on the wiki and on this list. I believe these try to integrate too many variables into a single grade; and measuring 30 different physical characteristics is also too slow and quite hard for the consumers trying to calculate if they should suggest using or avoiding that way for any given transport mode.

So far, nobody has proposed what I have come to think would be the most exact and most usable bit of information a _mapper_ can provide: "Did you get through with transport mode x?" Possible answers are:
- no
- just barely
- with extra effort/concentration/some difficulty
- yes

What constitutes "some difficulty" for each mode can be discussed more easily; i.e. for roller skates (never have) ruts, sett, tram tracks(?), but not curbs as such? These can be tabularized in the wiki later.

If you're in a "regular sedan", you can steer around the potholes and slow down (i.e. "concentration"), but if the wheels have to follow a very narrow path or the bottom of the vehicle would hit the ground, it's "just barely" for regular sedans. Or whatever local conditions the mapper comes across.

Surely, if the track is "just barely" traversable in a highly modified off road vehicle of brand Y with extras from brands Z and W, the driver of any other vehicle can assume they won't be able to use the track.

I haven't drafted the actual tags in detail, but I do have used 
- police:mondeo=yes (originally as "here I saw a Mondeo use the footway", but later also "I've seen other vehicles drive here or it's obvious a normal car could physically use this")
- police:mondeo=no 
- police:transporter:conditional=no @ (winter & 2wd)  ( as in "here I saw a VW Transporter fail to get up the incline on a footway")

The keys for a more general "suitable for use" tagging would have a prefix, a separator character (probably ':'), the general vehicle category possibly followed by more details (either a model, or something like high clearance), and the optional accessories would use the :conditional syntax.

known_suitable:motorcar = barely
known_suitable:motorcar:911 = no
known_suitable:motorcar:high_clearance = effort
known_suitable:Range_Rover = yes

The first driver can always add just the one tag that applies to their vehicle.

This might seem like a lot of work, but we have time, and mappers; enough data will accumulate with patience.


-- 
alv