I took this picture with the intention to use it to replace the smoothness=very_horrible picture on the smoothness wiki. It’s very hard to find tracks with such horrible smoothness, and the one on the wiki and this one are about as bad as it gets without being completely impassable. I think the main disadvantage of the one currently used is that you can’t clearly see how deep the ruts are because they’re filled with water. I don’t think it’s surface=mud though because the surface is still firm enough to cause damage to a vehicle with insufficient clearance. The surface needs to be quite soft for these ruts to form anyway.
I think the picture proposed here shows clearly that the distance between the top and bottom of the rut (red lines) is more than 24 cm (green arrow). Maybe it should be cropped more to hide the fact that you could probably drive around it with a " heavy-duty off road vehicle" and get through. It requires good driving skills, which should not be a requirement if I conclude this correctly from this thread.
Acceptable, though I think it’s on the “good” end of bad. I’m comparing it with the photos of the asphalt with potholes and the washboard unpaved road on the main smoothness wiki page table, which I think are worse than your proposal.
(you should keep right here to avoid the stones)(there’s a beginning of rut formation, but not so much that you need high clearance, so still usable with a normal car though driving carefully)
Sure, but I find that not only fine but desirable.
I.e. it is much better then the other way around (picture being at “worse” part of the bad would be worse solution).
Because e.g. if some user:
marked as intermediate track which should really be marked bad is much worse (regularly leads to user annoyance and even possibly unpassable ways / having to backtrack) than:
user marking as bad track which is actually intermediate (which would lead to mere “oh it was not so bad afterall” comment and perhaps some missed marginal opportunities)
Also, I have a proposed image for bad for grass. Or is it intermediate ?
Is it possible for surface=grass road to have reasonable passage for “city bikes, motorscooters, sport cars”? Is there such thing as surface=grass smoothness=intermediate?
For city bikes at least, absolutely it can be intermediate. The picture is hard to judge as that kind of grass can hide small bumps, rocks and wet spots, or unexpectedly turn into mud under your tires if it’s been rainy or be absolutely wrecked by heavier vehicles… But in the pictured conditions, it should be absolutely fine.
I think this kind of surface would be worse for motorscooters (smaller tires suffer more) and sports cars (this is basically a dual track road, so low ground clearance can become an issue) than for bikes.
I may be interpreting the image wrong, but to me it looks like the grass is worn down where the wheels of a car would go, and is longer in the middle (with the dandelions and their seed heads).
I would generally expect that on this type of road, the ground under car wheels gets worn and compacted at a higher rate than in the middle. Or at the very least, that the longer grass in the middle may hide rocks.
this one was not heavily used so it has not happened yet
I hope that it is clearly visible at the image, I guess that hunting for more clear one is on (help welcomed!)
I guess I can cycle there again at some point and take a new one
Composition of grass paver one is also not perfect, light was also poor - but this one is quite close to me, just 20 km by bicycle so I can easily take more.
I agree that if we can use only one picture to illustrate it (for a StreetComplete quest, for instance) and we don’t have one of the exact middle, then better use one that’s towards the good side than one that’s on the bad side so fewer map users will be disappointed. For the gallery we can have several pictures, so we could add “border cases” on the good and bad end as well as an exact middle picture and a few more. It would be good to add captions to describe this.
