[Tagging] Use of highway=track vs highway=service cemeteries, parks, allotment gardens, golf courses, and recreation areas

[Bert -Araali- Van Opstal]

The standard highway tagging is mainly based on the physical 
appearance.  Not the functional or just partly the socio-economic 
importance.  In Africa the majority of our roads are unpaved. That's why 
we created our own classification based on mostly socio-economic 
importance.  When we can't assign a specific service tag to a highway, 
we use track.

The USA specific section should be added on a separate USA country 
convention page, just like others countries do.  It makes the wiki 
unusable if we are going to do this for every country. Just make a link.

So for us it's very simple, if you have an unpaved way but you can 
assign a specific function to it you are fine to use highway= service 
and service=* with surface=unpaved.

Greetings,

Bert Araali

On 25/02/2021 20:48, Joseph Eisenberg wrote:
> Is it appropriate to use highway=track for minor access ways in parks, 
> allotments, recreation grounds, cemeteries, and golf courses?
>
> I've just updated the highway=track page after there was a long 
> discussion by US based mappers and addition of a USA-specific section.
>
> It appears that the debatable uses of highway=track in the USA are the 
> same issues that I've seen in Europe and Indonesia, so I've re-written 
> a couple sections of the page to mention that the tag can be used for 
> roads to access areas for firefighting, hunting, fishing, 
> birdwatching, gathering mushrooms, and so on, in addition to logging 
> and agriculture, and that they can be used for purely recreational 
> purposes. There is now also a section about debatable usage (e.g. for 
> any unpaved road, or for any rough/slippery road, things which can be 
> specified with surface=, tracktype= and smoothness= however).
>
> One question that is not clear globally is if use of highway=track for 
> minor access ways in parks, allotments, recreation grounds, 
> cemeteries, and golf courses is correct as similar to agricultural, 
> forestry and recreational use, or if it is more appropriate to use 
> highway=service.
>
> It seems this is done commonly in parts of the USA and I've seen it in 
> Poland and some places in Germany too, but there also seem to be 
> mappers who consider it incorrect tagging.
>
> -- Joseph Eisenberg
>
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