rename highway=track preset

[tyrasd]

This would bring it in line with the OSM wiki, solve at least some ambiguous situations (like openstreetmap/iD#6954 for example) and IMHO makes the description more precise. See also the entry in the controversial decisions page of the OSM wiki. What do you think?

//edit: some alternative spelling versions have been proposed below:

• Land Access Road
• Track Road
• Land Access Track Road
• Land Access / Track Road
• Off Road / Not Maintained

[bhousel]

"Minor Land Access Road" is even more ambiguous and doesn't raise enough of a signal to untrained mappers that these roads are potentially hazardous to drive and route on.

We really did put a lot of thought into the original name, and it bothers me a lot that this keeps coming up for discussion.

[ghost]

Also, it makes me wonder what a minor land is.

[bhousel]

Also, it makes me wonder what a minor land is.

It implies the existence of a "Major Land Access Road"

[ZeLonewolf]

I think "minor" is unneeded. I would prefer it simply be "Land access road". IMO that's the most succinct description at this point given the very extensive community discussions on this topic.

I also agree that "minor" implies that there are also major land access roads which doesn't make sense to me. Land access road are minor roads by definition.

[zekefarwell]

I was the one who came up with the phrase "minor land access road" for the wiki page, and while I think it is a good description, I don't think it makes a very good preset name. The complete phrases from the wiki page are even more descriptive, but much too long for a name:

minor land access roads that are not considered part of the general-purpose road network

Minor land access roads like farm or forest tracks

I think it is important to include the actual tag name "track" in the preset name so mappers using different editors aren't using wildly different names to refer to the same thing.

Other road presets include the underlying tag name:

• Motorway
• Trunk Road
• Primary Road
• Secondary Road
• Tertiary Road
• Minor/Unclassified Road
• Residential Road
• Service Road

Seems to me that "Track Road" would work just fine for a preset name. It may not mean much to a new mapper or be easily misinterpreted, but for better or worse most of the other road preset names suffer from this same problem.

[ZeLonewolf]

Missing from this thread is a link to the extensive March 2021 discussion on the tagging list, where the current wiki description was discussed:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2021-March/060353.html

[adamfranco]

How about "Land Access Track Road"?

It gets at the land-access concept that differentiates highway=track from highway=service|unclassfied|residential, includes the actual tag name, and doesn't make a maintenance distinction that might not be valid in some cases.

[Dimitar5555]

Agricultural Road could also be an option.

[zekefarwell]

Also, it makes me wonder what a minor land is.

This is a good point. The wording on the wiki page should probably be tweaked to "minor, land-access road" so as not to be interpreted as "minor-land, access road" (whatever that would be 😀).

[ZeLonewolf]

How about "Land Access Track Road"?

It gets at the land-access concept that differentiates highway=track from highway=service|unclassfied|residential, includes the actual tag name, and doesn't make a maintenance distinction that might not be valid in some cases.

If we follow the example of highway=unclassified's preset, this could be:

Land Access / Track Road

[pamolloy]

"Minor Land Access Road" is even more ambiguous and doesn't raise enough of a signal to untrained mappers that these roads are potentially hazardous to drive and route on.

I don't think this is universally true. It is generally accurate in the United States, but not in Germany where I currently live. Note that highway=track may be paved. There are other tags that describe whether it is hazardous.

[bhousel]

I don't think this is universally true. It is generally accurate in the United States, but not in Germany where I currently live. Note that highway=track may be paved. There are other tags that describe whether it is hazardous.

It is not universally true and was never meant to be (like any definition of any tag). It does not mean "paved", and never has. The German localization of iD calls it a Forest/Farm Road or something, and that's fine..

All of this has been hashed out extensively going back years. We shouldn't break a thing that's working mostly around the world just fine.

[tyrasd]

The […] localization of iD calls it […] or something, and that's fine..

This argument is invalid in my opinion. I strongly think that the English locale is special in the sense that it is the default for languages which iD is not yet translated in and there are also quite a lot of people choosing to run their OS in English instead of any local language. English is also the basis from which all translations of iD are derived from. It is comparable to the status of the English pages of the tag descriptions in the OSM wiki.

Therefore, the English version of any of iD's preset strings must take particular attention to be precise, unambiguous, clear and uncontroversial. We owe this to the OSM community.

[bhousel]

Therefore, the English version of any of iD's preset strings must take particular attention to be precise, unambiguous, clear and uncontroversial. We owe this to the OSM community

I agree you owe it to the OSM community. "Minor Land Access Road" is not any of those things. But anyway go ahead and rename it. I've said why I think it's a bad decision, and you're going to do whatever you want anyway.

[tyrasd]

you're going to do whatever you want anyway

I am going to do whatever the community is in favor for.

[bhousel]

I am going to do whatever the community is in favor for.

You're going to do whatever 5 loud people are in favor for, but not the thing that makes the map better or the thing that makes iD easier for new users to comprehend.

[tyrasd]

At the moment you are the loudest one here, Bryan. We definitely heard you and know what you are in favor for.

Let's wait and listen to the all arguments.

[woodpeck]

Good decision and long overdue. Currently, anyone with an English-langauge ID editor who clicks on a forest track in Germany is informed that this is "unmaintained" which is not what highway=track means in Germany. Same for many other countries. I agree with the sentiment that the English locale needs to work everywhere and cannot be tailored to whatever the situation in one English-speaking country might be. I wish the community had been involved in a similar fashion before word "unmaintained" was introduced.

[bhousel]

For comparison, Waze calls them "Off Road / Not Maintained", and has a pretty good description and guidance of how to use this road class in their editor.
https://wazeopedia.waze.com/wiki/USA/Road_types#Off-road_.2F_Not_maintained_Road

It does sound like the situation in Germany is kind of special. Are your tracks plowed after a snow storm? If so, why not just call these maintained / paved / publicly accessible roads highway=service? I've never really gotten a great answer to that question. The whole point of adding this stuff is to build a useful map. Please consider what Waze does an an example worth emulating.

[matkoniecz]

"Land access road" seems to be a fitting name for me, "Land Access Track Road" and "Land Access / Track Road" also seems fine

Thanks to @ZeLonewolf for linking https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2021-March/060353.html

Agricultural Road could also be an option.

Many are for accessing only forest land and while technically forest can be defined as special kind of agriculture it is unlikely to be clear. Also, see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2021-March/060353.html - it discusses use of this value to describe access to land that is neither forest nor fields.

We really did put a lot of thought into the original name, and it bothers me a lot that this keeps coming up for discussion.

It is mostly caused by fact that it ignored how it is actually used in many places outside USA and described all highway=track as not maintained

Maybe significant thought was put into it, but it was attempt to change meaning of widely used tag or change that failed to describe how this tag is actually used.

why not just call these maintained / paved / publicly accessible roads highway=service? I've never really gotten a great answer to that question.

iD issue tracker is not a good place to change meaning of established tags or to introduce new ones without discussing it with wider community. Doing it is why "this keeps coming up for discussion"

Maybe it is silly to tag maintained paved forestry roads as highway=track and should be done differently but issue tracker of a specific editor is not place to make such changes in general OSM tagging.

Maybe it would be useful to have special road type for "hazardous road" and so on, but in my opinion editors and presets should not be place where new tagging appears without discussion.

To be clear: often it is very useful to change established tagging of fix documentation. But authors of editors should consult it with others rather than instruct other to obey their ideas. Even if they think that their ideas are clearly superior. No idea whether I was successful with this, but when I encounter poor tagging scheme or misleading documentation I try to consult with others and discuss it in cases where there situation is not fully clear.

Are your tracks plowed after a snow storm?

In Poland it would be really unusual, and in places where it happens it was never clear to me why it was done.

But there are also other types of road maintenance. Which are often applied to road of this type (especially tracktype=grade1 =grade2 =grade3), so describing them as not maintained is a poor idea and misleading.

And even if that is poor idea - tracktype=grade1, tracktype=grade2 were quite clearly established with their meaning. So I am not surprised that there is opposition to "Unmaintained Track Road" used to describe all highway=track

[cliffordsnow]

I live in an area filled with highway=track, both for traditional agriculture use as well as for logging. Suggesting the use of minor land access would just be confusing to most mappers that don't spend time reading the wiki. I suspect that many mappers just rely on what the editor suggest. It's difficult enough to determine if the road should be a service or a track. For example, when does the way stop being highway=service and become highway=track on a farm.

@bhousel suggestion of using Waze term, "Off Road / Not Maintained" make much better sense. It clearly defines logging roads much better than minor land access. Trust me that highway=track is not a minor road when logging is involved. And they certainly are not suitable for passenger vehicles which is another problem with minor land access.

[matkoniecz]

Off Road / Not Maintained

This is quite good and not implying that all highway=track are not maintained. But still would be a poor label for highway=track surface=asphalt tracktype=grade1

Maybe separate label for paved / tracktype=grade1 would be a good idea?

[zekefarwell]

For comparison, Waze calls them "Off Road / Not Maintained", and has a pretty good description and guidance of how to use this road class in their editor.
https://wazeopedia.waze.com/wiki/USA/Road_types#Off-road_.2F_Not_maintained_Road

While there is overlap between what Waze calls "Off-road / Not Maintained" and what OSM calls "highway=track", they don't entirely line up. The distinction between highway=service and highway=track is what the road's primary purpose is. highway=service primarily provides access to buildings or other human structures/facilities. highway=track primarily just provides access to land (forest, fields, etc). My attempt to illustrate visually:

With Waze it looks like the same spectrum of roads is covered by three types: "Off-road / Not Maintained", "Private Road", and "Parking Lot Road". The lines between these types fall in different spots:

As the graphics show, physical condition matters for Waze classification, but not for OSM classification. I prefer the way Waze does it, but that's just not how is in OSM. In my area the distinction between roads that a normal car can definitely drive on vs one that may require high clearance or 4 wheel drive is pretty important, but perhaps in other parts of the world this is less useful. In OSM some Waze Private Roads would be service and some would be track. Most Off-road / Not Maintained roads would be track, but a few might be service if they provide access to structures or facilities. An attempt could be made to try and change the meaning of highway=track and highway=service to line up with the Waze classifications, but to me that seems like a major uphill battle doomed to failure.

[zekefarwell]

For example, when does the way stop being highway=service and become highway=track on a farm.

Roads leading from the public road to the farm house, barn, and other farm buildings are highway=service, roads leading beyond the buildings into the fields are highway=track. Why is this distinction useful? I don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But that is my understanding of how the tags are intended to be used.

[lgommans]

What I think when I hear...

Unmaintained Track Road

Definitely not a good quality asphalt path, which highway=track very well can be

As for unmaintained, if the farmer maintains it himself it can be maintained just fine. She or he definitely has a vested interest in accessing major fields, can look better maintained than some official roads.

Minor Land Access Road

• highway=service is for access roads, so this is wrong
• "land" is super broad

Someone who owns a building also owns the land, so any minor roads leading to that land, like a service road on the backside? This is simply the first thing I think of, I'm not purposefully trying to stretch the definition, but this sounds like it would cause a lot of mistagging for private roads. (Plus the "minor land" ambiguity, but that's resolvable with a comma.)

Track

Anything where tracks show, typically from a tractor. I guess we all agree that this would be a bad name, but basically what we should look for is the difference between what track means and what the tag means.

Land Access Track Road

Same "land" access problem. For me it really just triggers the idea of access to the land that you/someone own/s. Maybe that's just me though, maybe someone should ask an OSM noob, e.g. girl/boyfriend, since those are most likely to actually be the audience impacted by this change.

What I like about this option is that it includes the actual tag name, making it somewhat recognisable also for experts.

Agricultural Road

I find this the most clear value so far suggested in the thread, but then it got 5 downvotes 0 upvotes at the time of writing. I dunno what's unclear about a road meant for agriculture because that's exactly what it is. Matkoniecz argued that "Many [track roads] are for accessing only forest land and while technically forest can be defined as special kind of agriculture it is unlikely to be clear." That's how I would interpret it, so for me it is clear. But perhaps that's because I'm already in the know? Hard to say for certain.

Land Access / Track Road

Here the Track Road, as a separate part, seems to clarify Land Access from "anything that accesses someone's land" by communicating "typically found as tracks in the ground and it's about land access".

This sounds quite clear to me, given how hard-to-define a category this road type is. It might result in pretty good tagging behavior by those that didn't read the wiki, but it isn't great because track road is not actually fitting the (agricultural function) definition of highway=track.

Off Road / Not Maintained

This might be a major problem because:

• Same problem as current tagging, see top.
• I was going to joke that: people might also re-tag Belgium if we change it to this, since those roads also fit the description (jk).
• But then I realized that I used to tag many roads in Africa as highway=track before learning that highway=track does not mean "some tracks in the dirt". In low-income countries, highway=primary can be Off Road and the smaller ones (all of: secondary, tertiary, unclassified, residential, service) can very well look Not Maintained. Such roads perfectly fits the name, but are very very wrong. This might be worse than the current name which at least signals there should be tracks rather than a proper road.

---

What probably makes the most sense is what Matkoniecz suggested (if I understood the suggestion correctly):

Maybe separate label for paved / tracktype=grade1 would be a good idea?

Just have two tags. Avoid the whole problem by having two presets that result in highway=track. If it's hard to capture all the relevant conditions in one short label, then don't use one short label.

Even the option I think would make the most sense to little Luc (when he was still a noob), Land Access / Track Road, does not really fit for paved roads. Or Agricultural Road would be clear for little Luc because it's about the function (rather than its appearance), but apparently unclear for other people. I do think that Agricultural Road would trigger people to open the wiki more often to see what falls within this agriculture category, so might potentially be a good option because it's not crystal clear. But then perhaps the same can be said for Land Access, that also signals it's about function while being rather vague (to me).

Perhaps we should collect some of the more promising ideas and try it with on friends and family. Show (the same set of) pictures of some roads, give some preset names that somewhat fit (residential, tertiary, track) as available options, see what they pick. Maybe automate it into a minor unmaintained website to have the results be double blind. It doesn't have to result in one good option, it might tell us which ones are actually misleading (or in which countries they are misleading) and we can work with that information to get to better solutions.

[westnordost]

@andrewharvey It seems to me that such suggestion falls flat exactly at source strings that are different words in different dialects of English. I.e. at the very strings your suggestion is trying to solve, like possibly this one.
For example highway=footway + footway=sidewalk. What is it going to be - "Sidewalk" or "Pavement"? To paraphrase in such a case, e.g. "usually paved walk for pedestrians at the side of a street" won't work either - too long and going to be very confusing for translators.

The only true international source string would be the tag key+value itself (e.g. highway=track) and treat everything else including en-US as translations. But this excludes translators from participating that are not veteran mappers.
Hence, the best compromise is that the tag key+value is mentioned as a developer note and this is already done, see

(Anyway, feel free to hide this discussion branch as off topic)

[andrewharvey]

@westnordost fair point, you've convinced me, then we must make it clear that the source language is en_US and leave it for the Americans to decide their own localisations.

Transifix has localisations for Australia, India, New Zealand and United Kingdom, so basically the rest of the world is left out. Are there users from other parts of the world who do prefer to use the app in English but need their own regional variations?

EDIT: I just saw Brian's comment at #288 (comment) looks like there may be support outside of Transifex.

[1ec5]

From a usability perspective, we’d ideally choose a preset name such that users can find it when they need it and won’t mistakenly use for something different. A circumlocution like “(minor) land access road” is precise with respect to the wiki’s current definition, so it wouldn’t be misapplied to something unrelated. However, it’s also obscure, so it risks underuse. (Memorability is also helpful for clients like the Overpass turbo wizard. I don’t foresee anyone entering "minor land access road" in Wyoming.)

“Track road” looks elegant, but it suffers from the opposite problem, that a layperson is liable to confuse it for something wholly different. It’s pretty unlikely to be misapplied to a running track, but a more likely mistake would be applying it to a racetrack (which is a kind of road) or the service roads fronting a railroad track. “Track road” actually means “towpath”, though that usage is limited to dictionaries at this point.

By the way, this is not the only highway tag with a problematic name. “Motorway”, “trunk road”, “service road”, and “slipway” are all baffling or grossly misleading to speakers of various dialects of American English. In the Upper Midwest, new mappers routinely overclassify state routes, which are known there as “trunk highways”, so misnomers aren’t a purely theoretical concern. Ultimately, in the absence of an elegant, intuitive, precise term in American English, do we care more about misapplication or underuse?

highway=track is infrastructure usable for double tracked vehicles that isn't part of the regular public road network and mostly used for access to areas not accessible from that network. While that is often for farming and agriculture, I don't see a reason to exclude other uses just as it is IRL.

Just for fun, this way is County Road 8 (CR 8), part of the regular public road network. 🤦

Here’s what it’s like in real life, courtesy of YouTube and Mapillary. It’s a shame we need six different tags to express that it’s not a track but might as well be. But here we are.

Edit: And according to the Forest Service, the highway=unclassified needs to be trolled by even more tags: ohv=designated 4wd_only=recommended.

It's going to be locale specific, to me as an Australian, a track is a walking path, and trail is more commonly something you drive a 4wd vehicle on. For en_AU it's mostly just a "Fire Trail" unless it's on a farm.

It’s really tempting to call highway=track a “4WD road” or “Jeep trail”.¹ One of these terms probably would’ve replaced highway=track if Americans had gotten a chance to design a highway road tagging scheme of our own. 😏

EDIT: I just saw Brian's comment at #288 (comment) looks like there may be support outside of Transifex.

There are a few distinct things:

• The user interface already loads a localization specific to the user’s locale (language+country+script). This is granular enough to account for many dialectal differences, but not all of them.
• Some presets are scoped to a geography and filtered by the location of the selected feature. These presets are translated into all languages, including languages that aren’t widely spoken in that geography. This can be an effective mechanism for regional tagging idiosyncrasies or real-world differences in construction, like expressways and possibly school classification.
• Presets are not scoped to the location in which the user is located. That would require the Geolocation API on the Web or a similar API on other platforms. We’d still need to come up with a global default for each language in case the user declines to share their location with the application.

Footnotes

1. To be clear, “Jeep trail” does not imply highway=path jeep=dismount. 💪 ↩

[matkoniecz]

It’s really tempting to call highway=track a “4WD road” or “Jeep trail”

On the other hand, that would make many European highway=track highly confusing - many are passable with a regular car (legal restriction and gating is more blocking in many cases)

[1ec5]

That was merely an observation, not a proposal. I’m aware there would’ve been downsides. 😉

[simonpoole]

I don't think there is going to be a really satisfactory solution, naturally, as has been pointed out, we have an added layer of confusion because of the use of en-US in iD, but that's a done deed.

"land access road" would seem to work even if a bit bumpy and descriptive, it even maps reasonably well to German "Waldweg" and "Feldweg" .

[1ec5]

It isn’t just American English that lacks a natural word for highway=track as defined. Other languages such as Spanish also experience significant confusion about this tag. Despite the highly constrained official definition, people gravitate toward it for a variety of purposes that might be described as “pseudo-road” (also not a proposal).

[westnordost]

What do native American English speakers think about ...

Land access road / local country road (or alternatively add the second as an alias)?

"Country road" is mentioned in the definition of "dirt track" in the Oxford dictionary and in Merriam-Webster as "a usually unpaved rural road off the main highway". This sounds pretty similar to the highway=track defnition that seems to be somewhat leaned on the meaning of German "Feldweg / Waldweg" definition.

[ZeLonewolf]

local country road sounds like any local road in the country? "The country" in this context means a rural area. Doesn't really make a lot of sense to me and definitely doesn't describe the kind of road we'd tag highway=track.

[westnordost]

Ok, nevermind that then.

[zekefarwell]

As a native en_US speaker I'd say Land Access / Track Road or Track / Land-Access Road both sound fine. They are not entirely satisfactory, but as others have noted, that is probably not possible with this tag. I added a hyphen to make "land-access" a compound word. Otherwise, "land access road" suggests something that is both a "land road" and an "access road" since the two adjectives operate independently.

[cliffordsnow]

Native en_US speaker here. I live in an area full of highway=track logging roads and have no problem differentiate these from the typical service road. I like @1ec5 post about about 4X4 road. (I'd drop the seasonal since that only applies to areas with seasonal changes.) One of the problems with highway=track is that a typical family vehicle isn't suitable for driving on them. Yes people do get away with it but it's not something OSM should support.

Land access road is too vague. It could be a service road or a county road.

[westnordost]

FYI all, iD presets allow both aliases and terms to be added for a preset.

• Terms are simply terms by which the particular preset should also be found (e.g. type "fruit" and iD finds "greengrocer")
• Aliases are alternative names for a preset. The difference to terms will likely be (see Presets: Separate terms into synonyms and keywords iD#6139) that 1. if you type an alias, that alias will also be displayed in the preset search result list alongside the "primary/proper name" and 2. of course it has a higher priority for matching than terms. (Hence), aliases do not need to be synonymous with the primary name, they can also describe a subtype - as long as there is not another preset that covers that

I mention this because since so much brain power was now activated into finding the "primary" en-US name for highway=track, I want to suggest to put the other suggestions that have been made here into terms or aliases respectively, so it can be found better.

Scanning suggestions made in this ticket, it could be...

Name
land-access road

Aliases

• track road (or maybe not, see consider untranslated preset name as search term for (non en-US) English locales iD#9117)
• fire trail
• two-track road
• logging road
• forest road
• forestry road
• farm road
• agricultural road
• unmaintained road
• dirt road

Terms

• 4WD
• jeep
• high clearance
• off-road
• overgrown
• unmaintained

[matkoniecz]

It isn’t just American English that lacks a natural word for highway=track as defined.

Also in Polish! There are some terms that are just close enough to be maximally confusing and misleading. I would deprecate highway=track and highway=unclassified and highway=path and highway=road if I could and would replace it with something more clear.

[blacklocust3]

(tl;dr at bottom) Hey sorry new here but had an issue and was told to post here. Trying to add some maintained gravel forest roads, but only options on the iD editor were "minor road", "service road", and "unmaintained track road".

Per the Wiki and checking with other OSM editors, the road is indeed a track because its primary purpose is land access. However, the iD editor labels all tracks as "unmaintained track roads."

I think this is an issue because if I'm reading the wiki documentation for tracks correctly,

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=track

tracks are defined by their purpose (land access) and not by their quality or maintenance. Even a paved road can be a track. I think labeling the track tag as "unmaintained track" in the editor is inaccurate because it excludes maintained tracks.

Could it be changed to "track"? I saw another option was "track / land access road" and that also seems fine to me.

Tl;dr Tracks are currently labeled as "unmaintained track roads" which excludes maintained tracks. Change label to "track" or "land access road / track"?

[pamolloy]

Tl;dr Tracks are currently labeled as "unmaintained track roads" which excludes maintained tracks. Change label to "track" or "land access road / track"?

Thanks for posting @blacklocust3. This is the core problem and the conversation has perhaps gotten lost in trying to rename it. Unmaintained is objectively wrong in that most of these roads are in fact maintained (dirt roads need maintenance too!) and it gives the false impression (which you can see in this thread) that track means off-roading or 4x4 roads. Even off-roading or 4x4 roads can need maintenance!

[tyrasd]

Thanks to everyone who joined the conversation!

I've merged the version Track / Land-Access Road now, as this seems to be the solution which most people find acceptable.

To summarize some of the arguments which ultimately lead to this specific name:

• remove the unmaintained adjective from the preset name, as it is objectively wrong in many valid use cases of the tag
• include the term "land access road", as this is the most accurate description of the intended usage of the tag
• include "track" as it is a very common "technical term" in OSM-speech (other highway presets also reflect the tag value in their preset names)

[1ec5]

I've merged the version Track / Land-Access Road now, as this seems to be the solution which most people find acceptable.

Would the maintainers of this repo be open to continuing to explore better names for this preset in a separate discussion? There seemed to be a lot of discomfort or concern about each element of this compromise. The more I think about this issue, the less certain I am that American English doesn’t have the right word for this concept. But it would only be worth dragging out this discussion further if there’s any chance that a less unwieldy name would be approved.

[tyrasd]

Would the maintainers of this repo be open to continuing to explore better names for this preset in a separate discussion?

Sure! Feel free to open an issue. ☺️