[talk-au] Aus tagging guidelines on highway surface tags

[Andrew Harvey]

On Sun, 31 Jan 2021 at 15:16, Little Maps <mapslittle at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi folks, wondering if I can promote some discussion about the section of
> the Aus tagging guidelines on adding surface tags on roads. The text
> currently reads,
>
> “For most types of highway=* tags you don't need to specify the
> surface=paved key/value pair as this is assumed, however make sure you tag
> the road surface when it isn't a paved road.”
>
> This assumption is fine in large cities but is problematic in rural and
> regional Australia. Can I suggest that it is replaced by something like the
> following...
>
> "Surface tags should be added to roads wherever possible, especially in
> regional areas. This advice differs from that on the international
> key:surface wiki page, which states that, 'there is normally an assumption
> that the surface is surface=paved unless otherwise stated.' However this
> assumption is not valid across regional Australia as: (1) most roads,
> including many major roads, are unpaved, and (2) mapping intensity varies
> greatly among regions. Many roads that do not have a surface tag may not
> have been examined by mappers. Adding a surface tag will assist data users
> and help mappers to further refine the regional road network."
>

+1 from me. I believe there has been a shift in community sentiment
regarding this, the current wording reflects sentiment from a few years
back where you'd generally only map surface=unpaved and assume everything
else is paved. However especially with the Microsoft mappers adding many
surface=paved tags and with StreetComplete surface quest asking for surface
type for all roads, this has led to it being much more common for an
explicit surface tag to be acceptable. It's fitting to update the wiki to
say that it's now commonplace to always add a surface tag even when it's
paved to provide more complete data and higher confidence in the data.
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