unimproved residential city roadways

General talk
1

I started doing map edits in my neighborhood, but I have a doubt/question about the unimproved roadways. I did read the suggestions in the Map Features section of wiki, but they don’t answer my question. The question is: how to mark unimproved residential roads (within city limits). There are quite a few in my neighborhood and some of them could be bad to get into after dark. They are not service roads, but on the other the highway=tracks is recommended for agricultural use and forests. BTW, this is Portland, Oregon, US.

2

If its a residential street, then tag it as highway=residential
What do you mean by unimproved? If you mean unsurfaced/unpaved etc, then you can use the surface tag, to specify what it’s made of: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:surface
There’s also the tracktype tag, or tags for width and smoothness.

3

Vclav, thanks for all the options. There are so many of them, that I’m lost which one is used most commonly. The unimproved road is the formal name of the unpaved road, just as you guessed. The sign on the side of the road says simply: Unimproved Road.
Also, isn’t tracktype supposed to be used with highway=track primarily? As the name of the tag suggests?

4

I would go with residential, and then maybe mark them as “quality=unimproved road” then go to the wiki and document what that means, maybe upload a picture if you want to be a good boy… :slight_smile: Also tag them with surface as Vclaw says.

It’s very hard to understand what unimproved means, so docs are needed… :slight_smile:

5

Using highway=residential with any other additional tags for unpaved city streets is not right, I think. Because

  1. Most map renderers show them the same way as other streets and
  2. The application I know and care about (AndNav2) uses these streets like any other streets for routing.
    Now, some of the unpaved streets are almost as good as paved ones. But there are quite a few in my city, for example, that should never be because their not passable for regular cars.
    So, what is the solution?
6

Hi,

If tractor and Jeep are the best vehicles for driving along those roads perhaps highway=track could be a good choice for tagging.