I think you’re right, its useful info for a cyclist, but not sufficient. We need something like surface=soft_gravel.
From my little interaction with OSM community, I get the impression that any tag that theoretically applies to any form of transformation, will de facto skew toward cars. Cyclists and maps for cyclists just need to account for that, and place more emphasis on cycling specific tags. In this case, maybe it would help a bit if the bicycle-related evaluations were included in the table on the main page and not just in the gallery.
Agreed on your thoughts about how that terrain would be on a bicycle. Tires will mostly not sink, probably not even narrow road bike tires, it will just be extremely bumpy and unpredictable. Elevated chance of unrepairable sidewall damage to tires.
Any form of suspension makes it better (e.g. just a suspension stem/seatpost on a gravel bike, not necessarily proper mtb stuff), but it’s still going to be hard riding. Kind of similar to cobbles in that building up speed makes it easier to control, but that’s also dangerous as this surface is more unpredictable.
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There is also the use of the MTB Difficulty tag and IMBA Difficulty tag. Some renders and trail programs use the tags. I include these tags in my mapping to indicate the path is accessible by bikes, generally MTB XC bikes. Now, with a fatbike, there’s not much they can’t navigate and by the time you need one exclusively there may not be much of a trail. Example, sand dunes in Qatar.
now the question is where File:Road with dirt surface.jpg - Wikimedia Commons would go
surface=dirt smoothness=bad
?
or very_bad ?
smoothness=bad No need for high_clearance here
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Agreed on bad. From a cycling perspective it’s a constant and annoying texture, but easily manageable on any bike that’s intended for any kind of extended travel. This is easier than the worst example of ”bad” for compacted (showing washboarding).
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I tend to very_bad, as you probably can’t drive a normal car here comfortably even in good weather. @rhhs I keep repeating myself over and over again, but high clearance is not a criterion for this.
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The surface is obviously smoother than this one. And smoothness=very_bad is described in the wiki as usable by “Car with high clearance” since 2008.
Would File:Wood-3-Intermediate-A.jpg - OpenStreetMap Wiki be a good fit for surface=wood smoothness=intermediate ? I think so
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Honestly, I don’t know.
I found something similar and decided to just get off my bike and walk. I wasn’t sure about the strength of the ground (construction, planks).
In my case, I used
smoothness=bad. The surface area is supposedly sufficient even for city bikes, but the erosion of the material makes the boards’ durability uncertain. I walked along the middle because there’s a thicker rafter beneath the boards.
That’s not something we should take into account when evaluating smoothness. There can be many other reasons than the roughness of the surface why a way can’t be used, but that’s not what smoothness is about. For a weak bridge, we could tag maxweight=* (if it’s verifiable).
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lifecycle prefix may be also possible if bridge is damaged enough to not be usable in its original form
ruined:highway=footway for footway bridge rotted so much that it is no longer usable
highway=footway ruined:highway=tertiary for car bridge that is now so damaged that it is only passable on foot
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I’ve recently been using the value very_good and it’s been brought to my attention that that value doesn’t exist.
I think it should exist, simply for logical reasons, since very_bad and very_horrible are existing and also for practical reasons. We currently have 2 values to differentiate smoothness that is in a positive state and 5 values to differentiate a negative state. A 3rd value for positive states would be very useful since the gap between good and intermediate is rather big. The value excellent is only for perfect condition but there are surfaces in a very good condition that is not perfect but not bad enough for the value good.
It is hard enough to find a suitable value. We are discussing long enough what the original proposed values should exactly mean.
I don’t think we need more values.
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In practical terms, for what user group would this describe a meaningful difference? Excellent is now for roller blades and skate boards; would very_good be for one but not the other? Or would it create a difference between the racing bike and sport motorcycle currently in good?
Considering that we are relying on a somewhat subjective generalization of possibly quite long stretches of road, there’s a practical limit to how fine distinctions we can hope to tag with reasonable accuracy.
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I think in case of widely used tag with long history, that already suffer with subjectivity issues - redefining value list is the last thing we need here
even if that would be more logical list of values
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I wouldn’t expect to ride a Razor scooter down that very successfully so this seems intermediate.
The tag values look confusingly like natural language, but are just a string of characters for a computer to understand. We could have chosen to use values like grade1, grade2, etc (like for track type) instead, or values like thin_rollers (still mentioned in the wiki but never realised, sadly). A value like intermediate doesn’t really describe the smoothness itself: a surface with that smoothness would be quite bad for roller skates but excellent for a 4WD.
I think the present number of available values works well, and no additional values are needed to provide more detail.
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It would have been better to use grade values. We simply are not machines and are therefor influenced by the meaning of the words used. Even knowing that doesn’t erase that influence, so when intermediate is the value it is naturally linked to a medium state of the surface smoothness. If I ride a bike on a road with bad cobblestones it’s not just bad but very bad for me, but the description in the wiki for very bad doesn’t fit. Bad is the last value for a paved road in the wiki but I personally have often seen bad roads with cobblestones that were tagged with horrible.
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