Richard Fairhurst wrote:
Hi all,
There are almost 8m highway=track objects in the database (thanks
taginfo!), third only to =residential and =service (thanks TIGER!).
I'm interested to know what level of access people believe this implies in
their home countries.
On the Dutch Forum we’ve been discussing expectations regarding
highway=track: http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=25527.
In the Netherlands, there is no legal distinction between roads tagged in
OSM as highway=track and any other roads. So unless there are tags
representing access restrictions, the default on highway=track should not
block any form of access.
Some people feel that private tracks should not be routable. However, the
law only prevents access if there is a traffic sign and/or a notice
forbidding access completely i.e. =private (or allowing certain categories
access as =permissive while forbidding others). Tracks in woods/forest also
often have a barrier to prevent certain types of traffic. It is up to local
mappers to tag a track and/or a barrier with appropriate access tags based
on field survey.
Since tracks can have any kind of surface or level of maintenance, there is
some discussion about the advisability of routing cyclists over tracks as a
general rule. But, given the wide variety of surface characteristics of
tracks, routing decisions will have to be based on tagging with surface=* or
tracktype=grade*.
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