OpenStreetMap
Another Day Trip, to Sarahs, and the smoothness tag
Posted by apm-wa on 29 September 2018 in English.For the first time I used the smoothness=* tag. A day trip to Sarahs took me via Tejen and the P-7 national highway–pretty good road–then I returned via the P-9 national “highway” via Hauz Han. Holy smoke! It took us 2-1/2 hours to cover about 90 kilometers, for an average ground speed of 36 kph. There were potholes the size of a truck with potholes inside them! We drove on the sand in a few places because it was faster and smoother than the P-9.
I think this is the first time I have felt compelled to use the smoothness=* tag, and after reading the wiki article, I assigned it “very bad”. It is driveable in a light-duty SUV and perhaps even a passenger car, if one drives gingerly, but going is slow. It is, I think, the worst road I have seen in this country.
Sarahs itself has some interesting things to see. Polish and Turkmen archeologists are excavating the site of Ancient Sarahs, a city with layers going as far back as 5,000 years ago. On a more mundane OSM-related note, we discovered two new gas stations and collected the station number of a third one on the P-7 highway.
Discussion
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 2 October 2018 at 09:05
Would the
tracktypetag be useful here? It’s a little less subjective thansmoothness.Comment from apm-wa on 2 October 2018 at 16:36
@rorym,
Thanks, I looked at that, too. As I see it, there are two problems with using tracktype on this road.
First, it is not a track. This wretched road is part of the national highway network, believe it or not, and thus is supposedly a trunk road (highway=trunk) and not a track.
Second, with regard to the tracktype tag, none of the values fits this road. The tracktype grades go from paved (grade1) to unpaved variants. This road was paved once upon a time and still has asphalt on from 20- to 80-percent of its surface, but is so rough that using tracktype=grade1 would be horribly misleading. I don’t want to be responsible for misleading somebody into a broken axle!
The smoothness tag isn’t perfect but the criteria in the wiki were something I could work with–“very bad” seemed the closest, and I added a maxspeed:practical=36 tag since that was the average speed we enjoyed over that stretch of road.