I think part of the problem with the highway=track description is that even when you are there on the ground it isn't always clear what it's being used for. They are often two ruts in the ground disappearing of into the distance with little else to go on. If you then look at aerial imagery you may see that is goes to a single house and re-tag as driveway or that it serves multiple buildings and guess at whether the buildings lean towards highway=residential, highway=service or highway=unclassified. It's easy to say "primarily agricultural or forestry" but this is often rather difficult to verify.
There is then a separate problem in that OSM-carto, the default 'check that it worked' renderer, doesn't render road surfaces or tracktypes for anything other than tracks. This discourages the 'proper' tagging for those who want to tell at a glance how likely they are to get their car stuck or how likely it is that they will be able to do a three point turn if there are obstructions. Tangentially, I have always found the tracktypes a little difficult to apply if you don't have the type of soil depicted in the examples. Some ground tends to get "lumpier" rather than softer if you keep using it without improvement. On Sat, 30 May 2020 at 01:33, Andrew Harvey <andrew.harv...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think the wiki already does a good job at communicating this. > > iD already goes a step too far calling these "unmaintained track roads" > but if anything that would have prevented people tagging as highway=track > just because it is maintained, so not a factor in this case. > > I think the default renderer does play a role with some people might be > tagging for the renderer, but nothing can be done about that from the > tagging perspective. > > I see someone has left a changeset comment, that's the right thing to do, > it gives the person who made this change a chance to come back either a > counter point on why they really should be highway=track, or a chance for > them to learn about their mistake and improve so they don't make it again. > If you don't hear back from the comment, you could just go ahead and fix > them back to residential if that's how you know they should be. > > On Sat, 30 May 2020 at 08:12, Mike Thompson <miketh...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I know we just had a similar discussion, but I am discovering more and >> more cases where mappers have changed every dirt road they can find to >> "highway=track". For example, it looks like all of the dirt roads in the >> area of this way: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/17051445 have been >> changed to "highway=track", when at least most of them should be >> "highway=residential." What can be done to better communicate that OSM has >> a functional highway classification system (I did leave a change set >> comment, but I doubt it will do any good)? >> >> Mike >> _______________________________________________ >> Tagging mailing list >> Tagging@openstreetmap.org >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging >> > _______________________________________________ > Tagging mailing list > Tagging@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging >
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