Should I propose a new cycleway:surface?

General talk
1

I live in Northwest Arkansas one of the fastest growing/developing bicycle areas in the world at the moment, mostly because the family behind Walmart, the Walton family, has prioritized this community development.

We have a new trail Mountain Bike (MTB) trail Northwest Arkansas that has a relatively new surface type called Soil Tac and yes that is the trademarked name. If you would like to see a video on this here is a YouTube video about it (https://youtu.be/0m2OZvHo5cw). Also here is the product site for the material (https://www.soilworks.com/products-and-services/soiltac)

My question is when there isn’t a category for a real world use case at what point should it be proposed for consideration by Open Street Map? Should I pursue proposal? If not, how to you address this in the interim?

Obviously if I take a proposal route I likewise would need to avoid trademarked names and would need a more general classification so I’d also like feedback on what this might be called… Engineered Soil is what comes to mind.

Thanks to all who review and response this is my first OSM post and I realize how novice I am compared to the community at large so I trust your thoughtful responses.

JP

2

The iD-editor does not show all values for the surface tag.
The Taginfo website shows that there are more than 7700 different values used at this moment as surface. Probably not all of them makes sense.

cycleway:surface is used less, and has 33 values so far.

There is perhaps already one in use that matches your needs.
Otherwise, you could ask the tagging mailing list for the best value. You might get many different opinions though.

3

Currently there are 2 main general category, taginfo.openstreetmap.org/compare/surface=unpaved/surface=paved, and its taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/smoothness can be described. The closest I can think of is https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surface=compacted. There’s exactly 1 specific use of taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surface=stabilized in France (www.openstreetmap.org/way/594581652), that sounds ambiguous.

These are soil stabilizers. (“Engineered soil” is more used for special soil mix, and may be confused for any surface worked by engineering and construction) This may be difficult to verify or identify. Maybe it should be further refined with other tags, instead of a new value. Perhaps use

material=Soiltac

for now?

Use of trademarks depends on synonymity. For example, taginfo.openstreetmap.org/compare/surface=tartan/surface=decoturf are quite widely used.

4

Think he means

highway=cycleway
surface=*

not

cycleway:surface=*
5

I think it should be something like

surface=plastic

Not all people could distinguish particular Soiltac from another types of polymer