[OSM-talk] highway=unsurfaced

[Anthony]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:
> On 11/01/11 11:05, David Murn wrote:
>> On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 19:47 +0000, Tom Hughes wrote:
>>> On 10/01/11 19:00, john at jfeldredge.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> American usage would be to refer to that as a road, just not a very high-quality road.  I take it that, in Britain, there are certain minimum standards for being called a road?
>>>
>>> Nothing official, but it would be very unusual for anybody to call
>>> something that wasn't surfaced a road.
>>
>> Crikey, dont let them see the Old Eyre Highway across southern
>> Australia, or the Outback Highway[1] across Central Australia.
>> Together over 3000km of highly travelled road, connecting the western
>> coast of the country to the central/eastern regions.
>
> Sure, but if you read you will notice that I was specifically answering
> a question about what that would be called in the UK, not what it would
> be called in Australia.

The more important question is what the tag means.  Or is highway=road
a tag which has a different definition in every state?