1

Hello!

For those who don’t know what is the subject about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_road
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_road

In Russia we came to a question on how to map winter roads, that are entirely impassable during summer. Since Russia and Canada are the only countries that have winter roads, I decided to ask your opinion.

In wiki we can find only mention of ice roads, which are built upon water basins:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:surface%3Dice_road

Wiki suggests to mark this status in surface=.

It is clear, that value of the new tag should be “winter_road”. But the question is which tag to use? If we put it into surface=, and keep any standard highway= tag (e.g. tertiary, unclassified), then routing will be calculcated via winter and ice roads, and this is a unacceptable in summer. Putting it into highway= tag seems bogus, too.

Opinions? My humble one is: put it into surface, but teach most routing software to avoid them or warn.

2

Made a proposal: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/surface:winter_road

3

Sounds good I guess. I’m a newbie but I should probably chime in.

One question, how would one teach routing software to avoid them? What about old software? What compatibility issues might arise?

4

I’ve started voting on this feature.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/surface:winter_road

5

Although voting for the surface=winter_road was expected to
succeded, I decided to break at and redo proposal, because
a few mappers were strongly opposing surface= tag.

I hope, that with new proposal the voting will succeed with
a bigger yes/no ratio.

I also ask to be more active with your critics not in the
Voting stage but in the Draft/RFC.

To preserve history, the wiki page is the same:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/surface:winter_road