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

[Paul Allen]

On Fri, 26 Feb 2021 at 16:00, Florian Lohoff <f at zz.de> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 09:52:58PM -0800, stevea wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I dont think this ever has been like that and i am with OSM for like 14
> years. The visual appearance of a road was never the key figure to
> determine which road class it is. That was a shortcut mappers always
> took and take when talking about tracks.
>

I think you may be missing something implicit in English usage of
the term, something that British mappers may have understood
implicitly that wasn't documented.

Think of the etymology.  Start with "tracking" which means to
find (track down) an animal by the imprints (tracks) it leaves
on the ground.  A farm track (or any other) is a track because
the farm vehicles leave ruts (tracks).

I think it may always have been implicit that "track" meant
unpaved.  It didn't matter if it was the path a tractor regularly
took to get from one field to another on a farm or if it was
the driveway to the farm itself, if the vehicles left ruts it
was a track.

I'm not saying that's how it is now, or how it should be, I suspect
that's how it was back in the early days for British mappers.

-- 
Paul
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