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

[Bradley White]

In my relatively rural and heavily forested part of the world
(northern Sierra Nevada), I use 'track' to indicate a double-track
width road that is used for forestry & agriculture, but not used to
access any specific residence or amenity. I do not use it in the
following cases, granted (important!) that the road may be rough and
slow-going, but passable in a moderate-clearance 2wd car with careful
driving:

- Unpaved county-maintained roads [Counter-example: the famous Rubicon
Trail, which is a county-maintained right-of-way but is impassable
without a capable high-clearance 4x4 vehicle, is a 'track' and should
not be routed on]

- Roads that provide access to private residential properties (even if
they're just summer cabins), the publicly accessible road should be
'unclassified', and the private driveway 'service=driveway'

- Roads that provide access to USFS facilities (campgrounds, popular trailheads)

- USFS 'collector' roads that form the backbone network for access to
NF lands (again, with the assumption that they may, at worst, be rough
and slow but passable in a carefully driven 2wd mid-clearance vehicle)

The purpose for the existence of the road in the first place is the
most important factor in determining classification - roads that
primarily provide access to forest lands for recreational,
administrative, or timber-production use should be 'track', but roads
that exist to provide access to some specific facility should not be,
even if the specific facility is there ultimately to facilitate access
to the forest (eg campgrounds and trailheads). Powerline service roads
are the biggest gray area for me - these roads are usually not
maintained and are extremely rough (indicative of 'track'), but exist
to provide access to power lines for utility companies (indicative of
'service').

I think the main takeaway, for my tagging at least, is that the
purpose of the road is the primary consideration for determining
classification, and the surface condition is generally a secondary
consideration, up to the point where a high-clearance, low-range 4x4
vehicle would be required to pass the road, in which case I would
usually consider the surface condition of the road first and tag it
'track'. As a corollary, it would be difficult to convince me that an
unpaved road should ever be tagged 'secondary' or higher in the US,
except for perhaps the *most* rural areas of the country.