[Talk-us] Importing highway surface tags

[Adam Franco]

Hello All,

I'm pretty new to the OSM community and have gotten involved through a
hobby project analyzing road
geometries<https://github.com/adamfranco/curvature/wiki>.
I live in Vermont, a state where more than half of the road-miles are
unpaved graded-gravel. For the benefit of my project and hopefully the OSM
community I have been working outward from my home tagging highway
surfaces<http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Adam%20Franco/edits>as
gravel, asphalt, or concrete based on direct observation as well as
looking at high-resolution aerial imagery where available.

What I am interested in doing is bulk-tagging the surface of roads based on
public data where no surface tag has been manually set. Before I begin this
project (and pester my department of transportation for data) I wanted to
check with the community about the permissibility and feasibility of this
effort.

A few questions:

* Has anyone located a good source for state or national road surface data?
The TIGER data doesn't seem to include surface information as far as I can
tell.

* While the devil is always in the details, I'm assuming that a relatively
safe import could be done by only adding tags to ways that don't have
surface tags already. Are there other considerations I should be thinking
about related to not worsening the OSM data?

* Is this a project that the OSM community in Vermont, the broader region,
or nationally (assuming data is available) would support? I'd rather not do
a lot of work to prepare it if there is no desire for inclusion in the data
set.

Thank you for your feedback,
Adam
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