On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Thomas Meller <[email protected]> wrote:
> If the way is usable as an interconnect for main traffic, I would not tag > it as 'unclassified', at least if it connects towns and alike, and not > (one or more) single houses. If it makes access to a wide landscape > possible, I would tag it as tertiary, maybe as unclassified if it's very > narrow. That's where we have a fundamental difference between Europe and Canada. I can show you hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of countryside with zero houses let alone towns or villages. The main reason for access into these areas is for access to natural resources, such as forestry cutblocks, natural gas wells, oil wells, and mineral mines. Also as a byproduct of all the traffic in the bush, you'll find roads accessing hilltops where radio towers and forestry look out towers are located. My GPS navigator is designed for the regular motorist, who rarely leaves the paved roads. It becomes less than useful when out in the bush because most of these roads are not in the database. The OSM database, however has just about all of these roads, but the tagging scheme based on European standards would have us tag them all as little dirt paths in the bush, when in fact some of the main haul roads are much larger and better maintained than some of the government secondary highways. My opinion is that we tag these major haul roads just below the secondary highway status, so that they show up on a map with an importance similar to the level that tertiary roads appear. This would mean that a user would be able to see that the road exist, and might make the choice to make the shortcut through the bush on a forestry road rather than add a couple hundred km of distance by using the government road network. Obviously things like surface type and condition would have a bearing, as some people might not appreciate taking their fancy sports car down a rough gravelled road where huge logging trucks might throw rocks up into their windshields. If the information however is obscured do to tagging information not showing the importance of the road, the user can't make that decision. James VE6SRV _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
