[Talk-us] Usage of highway=track in the United States

[stevea]

For tens of thousands of edits, including what must be thousands of highway=track tags I have added to brand new ways (and TIGER ways which I discover are NOT TIGER's default of highway=residential, implying pavement, but are clearly by imagery unpaved, rural and more often than not, fully devoid of houses / residences), highway=track means to me:

• a "dirt road" (first and foremost, as in unpaved, or perhaps gravel), whether a public right-of-way (sometimes) or on private land (far more common in my experience),

• a "double-track" unpaved highway (as opposed to "single-track," how a mountain biker might distinguish, I tag those highway=path),

• usually, almost always "rural" (quite far away from conurbations / cities, even towns, villages or hamlets, though there ARE such things around these, which I'm much more likely to tag highway=residential + surface=unpaved if there are residences along them),

• "agricultural tracks" in areas of agriculture and forestry, which here are "most of them."  Although as I mention, on somewhat rare occasion, especially rural areas will have "dirt roads" that might be called highway=unclassified + surface=unpaved, but I (somewhat lazily?) tag these highway=track instead.  If one of these unpaved roads is identifiably residential (or even tertiary, due to wide-area access and / or traffic amounts) — these are all very rural and / or mountainous and of difficult, uncommon access unless you live there or are making a delivery — I'll use highway=residential or highway=tertiary with surface=unpaved to distinctly note this.  But I've noticed I don't seem to do this with highway=unclassified (+ surface=unpaved), even though I probably should.

I do NOT use highway=track on a private driveway, believing that an unpaved driveway (there are many, but not common) is best tagged with highway=service + service=driveway + surface=unpaved (or dirt, or gravel...) + access=private or access=destination.  I don't always add access tags, as I don't always know them, but if I DO know them I add them.  If there is a barrier=gate (visible in imagery or in my personal experience), I'll add that tag to a node on the driveway, usually quite close to its "host" or "parent" road (the road the driveway "roots" to).

I should probably add surface=unpaved to highway=track more often than I do, as I believe highway=track strongly implies (or actually "means") unpaved.  But I do (some of the time, not usually or often) add a tracktype=gradeN tag, with N=1 (ALMOST so smoothly compacted "unpaved" that it approaches the usability of a paved road:  higher speeds on a straightaway up to maybe 45 MPH / 70 km/h, no need for the added safety of a high-clearance or a 4WD vehicle on a road like that...) down to N=5, where a "double-track" (of parallel tire tracks) is so faint upon the land that it is almost invisible (but isn't).  Our tracktype wiki offers good photos for fairly easy-to-identify grades to assign for these five values, this isn't difficult.

I should note that in 2021 in the USA, "most" roads that "most" people encounter (around here, in my experience, YMMV...) are surface=paved.  Gravel or dirt roads are certainly found, but they are less and less common.  I do make it a point to identify them, either with a highway=track tag (again, implies not paved), or an explicit surface=* tag if I know the surface.

These have evolved over my dozen years of editing in OSM in approximately the order given:  I've gotten more likely in the last few years to add additional tags (at first tracktype, now with better surface=* and even sometimes smoothness=* tags).  Me joining OSM fairly soon after the TIGER import in the mid-2000s has affected this, but those more-long-ago habits have been supplanted by better tagging (tracktype, surface, smoothness...) more recently, up to today and into the future.

I hope this helps,
SteveA