Sorry for coming late to this discussion. I have been trying to get some attention to the surface=unpaved rendering issue for some time. Fernando alerted me that this discussion is now being held in this discussion list.
Essentially the problem is that currently there is no way to alert the users about unsurfaced roads. In countries, such as Brazil, this can easily become a dangerous situation. Please have a look at this location http://osm.org/go/Nq9hwSPZ <http://http://osm.org/go/Nq9hwSPZ> One of the tertiary roads is halfway unpaved. Can you see where? No one can unless you switch to HOT style. Even then the rendering difference is too subtle to serve as a warning. One way to work around this deficiency would be to use highway=track and indeed that is what many people do. However this is clearly the wrong approach. I would strongly favour a simple dashed border style whenever the surface tag falls into the unpaved categories. It is as simple as that. From my experience in driving on rural roads in Brazil, nothing else is required. I've seen the discussion about using tracktype for this purpose. I think that would be ill advised as it would generate yet another semantic inconsistency to OSM (using track-something for non-tracks, very much like classifying highways as unclassified). So please, don't. I agree that the surface tag is not be as widely used as desirable, but that may change once it is being rendered. Finally, I can assure you, from my own driving experience, that surface=compacted should be considered unpaved for all practical purposes. -- View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Tags-useful-for-rendering-of-roads-in-poor-conditions-tp5791303p5791478.html Sent from the Tagging mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
