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

[stevea]

On Feb 25, 2021, at 12:27 PM, Bert -Araali- Van Opstal <bert.araali.afritastic at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I lean in this direction, too, so +1.  However, if it "takes its time" to do so, it won't be the end of OSM or its wiki.  These kinds of country-specific things do (eventually) sort themselves out in wiki, often with "more swaggering" countries / data subsets out in front and a sense of order for other outliers / exceptions finding their way over the medium-term.  This is OK:  it seems natural and the right things end up happening, though it takes time.

> 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.

Yes, this works for me (and I believe many others), and is the "newer tagging style" I alluded to that I now do and have done for years.  Contrast that with the older style that is more strictly "highway=service MEANS paved" and "highway=track MEANS unpaved."  That's old-school now that we have surface=* tags — though a fair bit of this style exists in the map.

+1 also to Martin's comment that urban parks "lean towards" highway=service (and a surface=paved tag) and "natural" parks "lean towards" highway=track (perhaps with a surface=unpaved tag), though not frequently in the USA, as those two seem to be implied together, perhaps we could agree highway=service + surface=unpaved are better (more explicit) going forward.

+1 also to Mateusz' characterization that these areas "lean towards" automobile traffic being tagged with highway=service, while highway=footway, =pedestrian =path "(are) primarily (for) pedestrian(s)."

SteveA