[Talk-us] Unpaved streets

[Paul Johnson]

On Sun, 2009-09-06 at 21:12 -0700, Dion Dock wrote:
> >
> >> 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 have.  County roads are very rarely paved outside urban counties in
Oregon.  There was also an approximately 8 month span when the
Beaverton-Tigard Freeway was a four-lane, center-divided gravel road
thanks to a failed experiment at resurfacing the freeway with recycled
shoes instead of asphault (thank Nike for that idea...).  It's safe to
assume this is a common problem in countries that can't afford to
maintain infrastructure (such as most of Africa, much of southern Asia,
and demonstrably the US what with the above mentioned gravel freeway
incident and collapsing freeway bridges every couple years as long as
I've been alive).

>   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).

That would be a track grade 1, 2 or 3.  Smooth gravel surface that
you're capable of taking any car including something low to the ground
like a PT Cruiser at trunk speeds on would be a 5.  Track by itself just
means "it's not paved."

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