[Tagging] implied surface values?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On 2/11/20 09:51, Volker Schmidt wrote:
> Do we have any agreed implied surface values for the different street
> categories ? per country?
> 
> I noticed this phrase
> "in many cases this is implied by the way itself (for highway=trunk to
> highway=residential, paved is implied) "
> on the page
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Cycle_routes/cyclability#Tag_ideas:
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Cycle_routes/cyclability#Tag_ideas:>
> in the table entry "Surface".

I would think you can safely assume highway=motorway is paved (and
probably highway=motorway_link as well) even in the most desolate of
countries (those that cannot afford to pave will simply have nothing
higher than highway=trunk). Beyond that it's going to depend on the
country and the part of the country. In many rural areas (definitely in
Texas, but probably most of the US) highway=residential and
highway=unclassified are usually not paved, and further I wouldn't
expect them to be explicitly tagged with the likes of surface=unpaved or
a more specific value implying lack of paving. This, though, is due a
lot of rural roads in the US coming from TIGER data and still, to this
day, at least a fair amount of it is untouched and may never meet
certain standards for accuracy (I've been known to refer to phantom
roads that originated from the TIGER import as "TIGER barf").

Even in greater Houston, I've seen many highway=service that are
obviously unpaved. For many years, the street that the house I am in
backs up to (next door to the house I grew up in) was a gravel road; it
was finally paved sometime in the mid-1980s. This is long after every
other house in the subdivision was paved (this area used to be out in
the sticks back in the 1950s, where I-610 marked more or less the end of
the urbanized area, but had long since been annexed by the City of Houston).

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at rushpost.com>
http://www.rantroulette.com
http://www.skqrecordquest.com