[Talk-us] Unpaved streets

[Dion Dock]

>
>> Hello,
>>
>> In my neighborhood there are some unpaved residential streets. How
>> should those be tagged?
>>
>> highway=track
>>
>> highway=residential
>> surface=unpaved
>
> I would tend to go with highway=track unless the street in question  
> is a
> gravelled over macadam or some other semi-paved surface mostly because
> most routing engines and all renderers at this point are more likely  
> to
> use the highway tag to determine and render such objects correctly.

Mapnik renders highway=unsurfaced. That seems like a pretty good sign  
it's a common tag, even if the OSM wiki doesn't include it.

I think this makes a lot of sense, as I've never seen an arterial that  
was gravel.  I view the surface= tag as being more descriptive of the  
highway= value.  For example, if the road is unsurfaced (which to me  
means gravel), I might want to know how big the gravel is or whether  
it is more dirt than gravel.

I view highway=track to mean dirt roads with no gravel (e.g. 4wd roads).

-Dion