OpenStreetMap
During a walk I encountered a road in the forest that was tagged as highway:track. However it is paved full-width, by asphalt. Big enough for local traffic, smooth enough for race bikes.
I tagged the surface as asphalt. Or should the road type be tagged differently, and is ‘track’ not applicable to a road in the forest?
Discussion
Comment from aseerel4c26 on 11 April 2015 at 00:19
what is the actual use on the “road”? – tag this … and the surface and smoothness independently (you could tag the width too). “asphalt” is fine for a “track”.
Comment from Ohr on 11 April 2015 at 06:38
Tracks with asphalt are common in some regions. This is usually tagged with tracktype=grade1.
To me the difference to highway= unclassified is the use of the road: If it is mainly used for forestry traffic I would tag it as track but if is used as a normal road by other traffic I would rather use unclassified.
Comment from Diomas on 11 April 2015 at 11:47
highway=rack is something that appears after few vehicles run over the same path. Think of it as highway=path for people - no one creates highway=path it just appears when hundreds of shoes hit the ground at the same place. Otherwise it’s a highway=footway (if someone created it)
So when a road is prepared in some way (it has some paving or cleaning from bushes or the ground is graded) it becomes unclassified.
Comment from jutezak on 11 April 2015 at 22:47
It is upgraded for tourism in the forest I think, with a parking lot at the park entrance.
Comment from Alan Trick on 12 April 2015 at 04:20
If it’s a road to a park then I think at least highway=unclassified would be normal.
In British Columbia, many of our roads (regardless of their use) go through forests, because there are forests all over the place.
Comment from jutezak on 12 April 2015 at 07:11
The road/track itself isn’t used for car traffic, but at the edge of the forest is a parking. The road/track goed from there into the forest.
But I wonder how we can determine this in an objective way. People working in the forest will say ‘of course the primary function is forestry’ while tourists will say ‘oh yes, the occasional tractor every other week or so, but a hundred tourists every day’.
So - also because it looks like a road, and not like the track image in iD, I lean toward highway. But because I do not like edit wars I will leave it as is.
Comment from flohoff on 12 April 2015 at 08:47
I have a simple rule. If there is any regular non agricultural traffic e.g. there is a residential building on that road then it CANT be a track. The traffic to and from residential buildings outweight the agricultural usage by an order of magnitude. You’ll have the Waste Lorries, Postman etc coming through that road.
If there is no such use and no public is allowed to use that road except for agricultural use then its a track.