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

[stevea]

Yes, Paul, I'll reiterate that there is some history for some of us long-timers which is reflected in how we USED to map vs. how we map today.  Speaking for myself, "what I learned and how I learned it" (back in 2009 or so) was that "track" either strongly implied or actually MEANT "unpaved."  And I saw a lot of fellow mappers in the USA also doing that when I mapped with an imagery layer that let me see that what they mapped with highway=track were indeed unpaved.  This reinforcement led to the once widespread practice of "track=unpaved" (rather than track=agricultural / forestry) when it shouldn't have, but did.  Yes, I and many others have learned to rid ourselves of this bad habit, but its legacy persists in some places.  So, good mapping often begets more good mapping, but unfortunately poor (or uninformed) mapping often does the same.

Off-list, Martin K. reminded me that "surface" has been a part of our wiki since 2006 [1].  So one "seldom spoken about" aspect to this is that many OSM users (myself included) don't always learn better, more-correct, firmly-established-well-in-other-parts-of-the-world styles of tagging (like using surface=*) when we should.  That's persists as an undercurrent to this topic.  Tactics like editors "prompting" for understood to be correct tagging can and do help here, but there is ultimately no solution for an ignorant mapper (no judgement with that word, simply a fact some of the time) who maps with incorrect tagging while thinking it is correct or "correct enough" (for now, for here).  Or simply not knowing an appropriate tag even when it exists, but "cobbling together" another set of tags that seem to do the job, then merrily repeating this far and wide.

For example, I recall the vividly intelligent and resourceful Kevin once describing for me the difficulty of how to tag what looked like forest roads, but they weren't, they were sometimes adjacent to power lines and didn't always have a "road" (track) per se on them, but they were almost always straight-as-an-arrow and how to tag these darn things, as they were real, they let sunshine into the forest in a linear way and how to tag these darn things...his frustration was clear.  I simply replied "man_made=cutline" with a link to its wiki and he was totally surprised that such a wonderfully-perfect tag existed for the semantic that he was experiencing.  The moral of the story is that it really happens, even to very experienced, knowledgable mappers, that a tag, tagging scheme, a PERFECT way to tag exists in OSM, but the mapper does not know it and often doesn't know how to find it, even with diligent wiki-searching.  This really happens.

As long as I'm talking about Kevin,
On Feb 26, 2021, at 9:36 AM, Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com> wrote:
> answer the corner cases with "if you can't determine a bright line for a classification, don't map it."  Nevertheless, I think that the consequences of ignoring this particular cry are minimal. My impression is that many others in North America agree with me.

So I'll say that as a North American mapper, I strongly agree with you.

And as Florian says about his "rule of thumb in Germany:"
"If there is a postal service, parcel delivery, school bus, garbage truck or its the road which makes residential living accessible its NOT a track"

I'd like to agree with him in an ideal world of perfect knowledge of what roads are "by usage."  But when mapping, I'm not going to wait for a garbage truck or a school bus to drive by to get the tag perfectly right.  (Even if it does on Fridays, if I'm there and watching the other six days of the week, I'm going to miss it).  Instead, I'm going to describe the road as "what I see and experience as to what is on the ground," as I've been admonished to do many times in many ways.  Perfect prediction of whether a tractor or logging truck does or will drive over it has never been my concern, and even today, I'm not sure it should.  Asking mappers to wait to see if a garbage truck or a school bus uses a track and saying "don't map it if not" is a clear case of "perfection being the enemy of the good."  I'll do a "good" job of mapping a track, thank you very much, and if somebody else (or even me if and when I learn more) want to tag it perfectly, that can wait for another day, all without breaking OSM.

Ladies and gentlemen, this very lengthy thread reveals many difficult aspects of tagging:  historical vs. newer, how to educate novices and expert mappers alike, wide variability in different world regions and much more.  While it's great to discuss, let's understand the scope of what's being asked, discussed and how things might be solved in the context of how we HAVE solved things:  not always by a new tagging scheme or tweaks to renderers (though, those are important when warranted) but by wide knowledge of what we're trying to do and that there are many, many voices, levels of understanding and interpretations of definitions, even with the highest of ethics and good intentions.  As all of us and our good intentions and wide levels of understanding bump and grind against one another, let's remember that we share the same goals of creating and continuing to create "a better map that is always getting better" and we'll likely criticize each other less as we realize that there are many paths to those goals, not a single one right way to do things.

SteveA

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/w/index.php?title=Key:surface&oldid=14004