What does "Usable by" mean?

General talk Tagging general discussion
2

My arguments for voting “Just passable”:

  • From the beginning of the establishment of the smoothness key, it was intended that “usable” should be interpreted as “without significant risk of damage or injury”. Comfort was never mentioned. “Just passable” is the original intent of smoothness

  • “Passable” is a much more objective and verifiable criterion than “comfortable”, which is very personal. Anyone who drives a normal car with ground clearance >14 cm on a road and damages the undercarriage can objectively and verifiably conclude that smoothness=very_bad or worse. Any mapper who sees that a certain bad road is used by a few normal cars can objectively conclude that smoothness=bad or better, while he can’t observe how many normal cars avoid that road because it is uncomfortable to drive on. A mapper who sees someone riding a racing bike fall or damage the wheel rim can conclude that smoothness=intermediate or worse. It is much more difficult to objectively determine for the average mapper how many racing bikers avoid a way because it is uncomfortable. It is very personal what people find “comfortable”: some find it very important; others don’t mind roughing it a bit, and there are masochists…

  • All ways with smoothness=bad and worse are uncomfortable, and the vehicle used doesn’t matter much. Consider this picture, which is in the very_bad (Car with high clearance) column in the present Gallery. However, it is passable by a normal car (though slowly), and using a car with high clearance doesn’t make it more comfortable (you would have to drive equally slowly).

    1200px-Kamieniec_Szalejow_Gorny_road
    1200px-Kamieniec_Szalejow_Gorny_road1200×900 283 KB

  • We should not be the ones to determine what level of comfort is acceptable, but leave that to the data end user. A routing app could have a setting by which an end user could choose themselves which comfort level is acceptable to them. A user who doesn’t like to cycle on smoothness=intermediate ways could then set the app to allow max. 100 m on such road (or max. 1% of the total route, or max. 30% longer route to avoid smoothness=intermediate ways, etc.). A user who doesn’t mind cycling on such ways could set the app so no detours to avoid them are allowed.

  • The practice is already in use for the “bad end” of smoothness values, so why should there be a different practice for the “good end”? We could edit the wiki so that excellent is for all_wheels, good is for thin_rollers and intermediate is for thin_wheels. This is a relatively small edit to unify the different tagging practices.

Now off to do some mapping :wink: