I think the main weakness of the StreetComplete way of evaluating smoothness is that it focusses too much on the visual appearance of the surface. We don’t want surveyors to compare the surface of the way they’re surveying with pictures on StreetComplete. What we really want is that the surveyor tries to image what it’s like to use the road. He/she should imagine that he is driving the road with his own car, or riding the path with his own bike, and think about what he would recommend to his friends about using the road/path. The bold text below the table is crucial: “The smoothness of a way should be assessed solely based on whether the way is usable by the vehicles mentioned above”. So instead of trying to find images of surfaces for each surface category, maybe we should have focussed on finding images of vehicles using roads of the various smoothness tag values, no matter on which surface. It would also remove the perceived “need” to have images of surfaces of all smoothness categories before a smoothness quest can be asked. I think it is a great pity that smoothness is not asked for surface=ground and other unpaved surfaces, because this tag is especially useful for categorisation of highway=track (and the reason why I’m very interested in this tag and took the initiative to add the “description” column on the English wiki page).
Maybe we should discuss this at streetcomplete/StreetComplete · Discussions · GitHub ?
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