brad wrote: > I see tracktype as redundant with Surface, also very subjective, and > not useful. Smoothness is very useful.
smoothness= is a horrible tag, please don't use it. As a data consumer (for cycle.travel), I probably do more detailed parsing of surface and related tags than any other consumer, and smoothness= is almost always misleading and ambiguous. People use it to record their arbitrary impressions of a path without any reference to an objective scale whatsoever. There is no consensus as to whether the smoothness tags are relative to the tagged/implicit surface or not: is it possible to have smoothness=excellent for an excellently smooth gravel surface? What does smoothness=good, highway=track actually mean? About the only circumstances in which it's useful are to record that a trail is universally impassable. Otherwise it should die in a fire. tracktype= isn't great but it has the advantage that it uses a clearly arbitrary scale, so most people tag by reference to the photos on the wiki rather than just because they think "this is horrible". 80% of the time surface= is all you need. We could do with more and better documented values for it, especially for clarity around gravel. I could see some virtue in another tag to be used _only_ when surface= is also present, documenting how well the surface is maintained, so that you could differentiate between (say) potholey, broken-up asphalt and immaculately maintained asphalt. Richard -- Sent from: http://gis.19327.n8.nabble.com/Tagging-f5258744.html _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
