[Talk-us] Unpaved streets

[Greg Troxel]

Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> writes:

> OK, but can you drive them in a PT Cruiser Touring Edition, a Porche
> 911, or some other low-slung, stiff-suspension vehicle on it without
> problems?  How about a road bicycle (which absolutely depends on
> pavement)?  Probably not going to be happening.

Yes, you'd be ok in those on some roads, and of course not on some.

But 'residential' isn't about road quality, it's about whether a road is
a "public way" or "private way" vs. something that happens to exist in a
farm, forest, or some other sub-legal-road setting.

In Massachusetts, roads (and private ways, but not driveways or farm
tracks) are separate lots on assessor's plots and the at the registry of
deeds.

At

  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway

track says:

  Roads for agricultural use, gravel roads in the forest etc.; usually
  unpaved/unsealed but may occasionally apply to paved tracks as well, see
  tracktype=* for more guidance.


Most proprietary maps I've seen show only what I'd call
highway=residential and up.  Driveways and tracks in forests are
omitted.  I think that's because they are car navigation centric, and
also because of the legal classification of roads.



I think the real problem here is that different people want to attach
different semantics to tags, but we have nonorthogonal tags.  For roads,
there are two mostly orthogonal concerns:

  legal status

  physical condition

I am arguing that highway=residential speaks to legal status but doesn't
say much about physical condition, and that physical condition tags are
needed.  If I understand you correctly, you would label a track an
unpaved road that is a distinct parcel owned by the town, has a name,
houses with numbers and addresses on that road (and appears as a road on
most other maps).  I see there is some support for this notion at

  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_roads_tagging

and wonder if it is new - I don't remember seeing that on my previous
reading, and I don't think it's the right thing to do.  My wiki-fu is
too weak to do 'svn blame' on the source...


Separately, we need an equivalent tag to residential for roads that are
less than unclassified but don't meet the residential notion.