Snowmobile trails along roads

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I have come across many snowmobile trails that are in the ditch, along the side of rural roads. At the same time, there is no trail in the summer. This is common along rural county roads. For example, both sides of 160th Street West in Rosemount (i.e. Way: 1048256819 | OpenStreetMap and Way: 217620738 | OpenStreetMap) and some are only tagged with snowmobile=designated (e.g. Way: 217603604 | OpenStreetMap).

I have searched and seen many questions and collaboration on this subject but they all seem to turn out a little different each time. It seems there is no standard for mapping snowmobile trails along roads. Am I just not finding it?

One good solution I came across suggested to use “highway=path + seasonal=winter + snowmobile=yes/designated”. But this also seems redundant. In many cases it would make sense to tag the road in a similar way we do with cycleway:right=*. That way a path wouldn’t be rendered that is only there in the winter and likely changes from year to year.

Does anyone know of a good way to tag these types of trails? Or is there a good way to propose tags for this?

Thanks for your input!

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A piste:type=snowmobile, type=route, route=piste relation ?

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There’s some really bad snowmobile mapping in Maine and thereabouts which appears to have just been done as ways on a map without any thought of how it intersects with other features.

I agree with @yvecai that a relation is probably the best solution here. highway=path is problematic because anything that doesn’t parse the additional tags (like seasonal=winter) won’t fail safe. You could maybe create a new highway= value for those relation members that aren’t a highway of any other sort.

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no need, just put piste:type=snowmobile on a way, like it’s done for ski pistes.

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I really like this idea. It looks like piste:type would work well as far as map rendering gose. It would not render a path that does not exist other times of the year. Right now, there is no documented value of piste:type=snowmobile. How would someone go about proposing this to get some more input?

There may be problems this could cause. For example, all other piste:type values are for people on foot or fatbike. Tagging this for a fast moving motorized machine seems like it is outside of the scope of piste.

At the same time, it seems like tagging a road with snowmobile=yes is suitable but that could also be perceived as ridding in the road instead of in the ditch.

There are a lot of factors. And maybe there is already a way to handle this. :person_shrugging:

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see Snowmobile feature type needed - #5 by yvecai

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You could go through the wiki proposal process if you want, but seems like overkill in this case since it’s a logical extension of the already well established piste:type key. I’d say just start using piste:type=snowmobile and document it on the wiki. You don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval.

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