[Tagging] Highway classification in Antarctica

[Fernando Trebien]

On Wed, 24 Apr 2024, 20:31 Brian M. Sperlongano, <zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:
> if you can convince me that it's actually a road.

It is clearly an ice road.[1][2] It is made of compacted ice, it was
built over two years by levelling snow and filling in crevasses, it is
maintained/rebuilt every summer and is used by heavy tractors pulling
sleds to resupply Amundsen-Scott. In 2013, someone pedaled a tricycle
on it all the way to the South Pole. Its Wikipedia article describes
it as a road four times.[3]

Wikipedia describes a "road" as "a thoroughfare for the conveyance of
traffic that mostly has an improved surface for use by vehicles."[4]
And since we have surface=ice in OSM, an improved surface can be made
of such material.

The OSM wiki redirects "road" to "highway" and defines highway as "any
road, route, way, or thoroughfare on land which connects one location
to another and has been paved or otherwise improved, including by mere
trampling by a sufficient number of humans, to allow travel in some
way, including by motorised vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, horse
riders, and others".[5]

Which of these definitions are not met by the South Pole Traverse?

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ice_road
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI2Cxl-L9u4
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road
[5] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highways