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

[Simon Poole]

Am 25.02.2021 um 13:50 schrieb Frederik Ramm:
> ...
> It is a discussion worth having. Frankly, I find the idea of erring on
> the side of caution has something to it: "I can see there is a road here
> but I am 5000 miles away and hence I have zero clue if this road is
> available to the general public so I won't claim that it is" - it's not
> the silliest idea.
>
> Tagging something as "highway=track" without further details will be
> interpreted by almost anyone as "being available to the public".
>
> As someone who is part of the team that receives complaints from land
> owners, park managers and the like, I wonder if we as a project need to
> start exercising more caution when we carelessly claim that any track we
> spot on aerial imagery is usable for the general public.

...

The solution is really regional defaults for implied access, because 
your argument works the other way around too.

Just because in the US and the UK a highway=track has a high probability 
of not being available to the public, shouldn't lead to not being able 
to add them from remote for countries for which that assumption is 
actually true (naturally actually verifying what the situation is, is best).

Note: I don't believe there are automotive routers that will use tracks 
by default, however pedestrian and bicycle traffic will often get routed 
over them by default which is the source of most complaints in the UK. 
In the US it tends to be the TIGER legacy that the classification is 
actually mistakenly higher than track and that causes the issue.

Simon


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