Would it be possible to distinguish between paved and unpaved roads? My intention is to identify paved roads to create road bike routes.
Yes, you can parse the surface= tag, the tracktype= tag and similar. However, note that in some parts of the world, particularly the rural USA, surface information in OSM is very incomplete.
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- Are you actually programming / scripting / developing, or only finding an app or website?
- What country?
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Also worth mentioning that the Australian OSM talk/community group decided to ensure that all roads have a surface tag. Much of the country internals have unpaved roads and no tag generally seemed to assume them as paved. As a result a lot of effort has gone into tagging to at least the unpaved/paved level and it is now a lot more accurate.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_Tagging_Guidelines/Roads#Road_Details
This is the overpass query I use to show no surface tags (ways in red)
(Orange ways being paved, blue being asphalt/concrete etc and grey any form of unpaved)
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absolutely, we already do this, the tag is “surface”