David Bannon wrote: >"Should I use this road or not ?" > tracktype= does claim to use that approach
It's a shame that we, the community, don't excel at documenting. The part about "how well maintained" on the Key:tracktype page was added later after the values. There is a connection, but tracktype wasn't meant to be about "usable or not", but about the most influential attribute of the road construction (or lack of, among the easily observable attributes), of all the attributes that are involved in shaping the conditions road users see on any ways not up to the highway standards of the present day. So it's a description of a scale from "hard materials only" to "soft materials only". The connection to "maintained" is variable and complex, but usually the grade is also a good approximation of the maintenance, but there can be, and there are, exceptions. One does not usually(?) maintain a road made of soft sand only, but a track on exposed solid rock is "hard materials only" even if nobody ever raised a finger to "build" the way. A user can deduce expectations from the combination of surface=*, tracktype=*, their vehicle, season, and local weather - and in some cases, even smoothness=* if the rocks, roots and potholes prevent some users. There can not be anything beyond "soft materials only", that's quicksand. If many mappers have actively used the tag to describe their assessment of "should i use or not", the meaning of the tag has diverged from the use in other regions, and we'll never know which one was meant. (Luckily, there's seldom any major difference - it's probably be the rare extreme cases that can be in disagreement.) If mappers want to tag a subjective "should i use it", it should be some other tag if the hard/soft materials scale doesn't suit them. But for which road user? -- Alv _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
