Re automated changeset quality checkers: I believe I looked at one of these once and came away very dissatisfied with the whole business. When JOSM is telling me that there’s unnamed “residential” roads touching the slew of often unnamed residential roads I have just turned into named and numbered unclassified/track/service roads, I tend to say, “Yes, but this changeset is already obnoxiously large and I’m going to get those in the next one.” Even when I finish fixing those too, it still counts against me.

I’ve been known to add a ford where there is no waterway too, and that didn’t get fixed in the next go. Still seems important when an otherwise “good” road sets out across a river(!) without a bridge or even culvert. I tried to redirect one person’s attention to drawing the river to fix a ford issue instead, but I’m not diplomatic enough or they’re not interested in waterways. (If you’re a person interested in drawing waterways, here is a map of missing GNIS named waterways.)

Re improvements to the iD interface: The suggestion seems very verbose, which is rarely an effective strategy. Simply changing the order so that the “ignore” option comes first instead of last could be what someone needs to understand it is valid, not just tacked on as a last resort. The wording could be changed. “I don’t know” might work. Although the most honest, a lot of people are uncomfortable admitting it. “Cannot be determined at this time” might be effective. It’s getting wordy, but “cannot be determined” without the modifier is false.

Honestly, these are 100% well intentioned edits. The ones I’ve seen are using iD, so they’re operating under the pressure of a nag that inserts itself above the tag fields. After so long with sophisticated editors, they’re not going to see a lot of errors, so it’s quite understandable to interpret these “issues” as “errors”.

I live in the wild west and travel the wilder west, so there’s too much needing done to bother checking what is hopefully as good or better than I left it. A couple months ago I turned my attention to a Congressionally designated wilderness and booted the single “residential” road crossing it for three trails. Two of them do happen to follow within half a mile of where the road was drawn. For Trinity County, within half a mile can be pretty good. (Oh, the things I’ve seen in TIGER data…)

I just want these editors to consider “ignore” as a legitimate answer when they can’t find evidence for how a crossing occurs. This isn’t a natural inclination, after all. But the TL;DR of it all is: If it is important, it has to be correct. A guess isn’t good enough. If it is not important, it can wait until someone knowledgeable does it. A guess isn’t needed. So please, just hit that “ignore” rather than guess.

And now for the argument that comes down on the side of using “track”, because the writers of the ohv and orv wiki pages clearly come down on the side of using “track” for ATV and there’s even a little suggestion of using “track” for motorcycle trails. Okay, the ORV page explicitly suggests using “path” for motorcycle trails “as often width-restrictors and trail maintenance only extends to this narrow width to permit only these types of vehicles”. Same thing applies to ATV trails! Unlike the atv page, they do look like there’s been some thought going on in the writing. (Admittedly, OHV and ATV both have the same main author and ORV needs help with its conversions between inches and meters.)

[Oh, bother. I’ve forgotten the argument I formulated this morning. It was very convincing, I assure you. Besides, a “narrow_track” is, quite obviously, a track with a narrow “width” set. Obviously.]

And if the Hummer goes down that ATV trail on the east side of Pilot Creek, well, there’s one less Hummer on the road. It may be that “track” also does some heavy lifting, but no more than “path” even without these.

Some notes: Never “FS” in front of the reference number for a road. The usage is either “FR” for secondary roads (forest road/route), or “NF” for primary roads (forest highway/arterial). (See here.) These denote the road system. Trails don’t have these. Never “TR” or whatever else you are making up for the reference number of trails. It’s meaningless. References are usually supposed to only contain the number, but roads in the US have prefixes by custom. ATV trails are in the forest trail system, so should not get a prefix. That’s one way to tell the difference between the road you can drive and the road you have to get out and use your noisy, open vehicle on, at least in the National Forest. At least if people are following the convention.

Signage: Quite often it’s only the reference (sometimes in a shortened version leaving off the initial digits) that gets signed, so it’s important to use a renderer that displays references.

Aside: OHV vs ORV. Of course you only need one and of course it should be “ohv”. Most of these places still require users to be on designated routes and ORV suggests otherwise. Also, “ohv” is vastly more used.

“max_width” is a legal distinction. These roads are limited to 52” or less, so the trail is (hopefully) at least that wide. I’m not so sure that’s true on this trail across Pilot Creek in Six Rivers National Forest. However, there’s some in Los Padres National Forest that go across fire roads and the restriction is only imposed by a gate at the start.

And I see that’s been changed to “maxwidth” recently, and that seems to be the correct usage. Dude, poke me when I’m getting it wrong! I guess the user probably doesn’t know if I’m getting it consistently wrong or will even touch an ATV trail ever again. Also, those pokes can go either way easily. (User who added bridges to unknown stream crossings on a cheap secondary forest road that would never ever see one bridge, let alone four, didn’t seem to appreciate the poke…)

I’ll fix those in the next couple days. There haven’t been that many. Also edit this entry.

Function rather than form is what the “highway” tag is about, which brings me to another (but related) line of reasoning leading to “path” since the ATV trails function is fundamentally the same as the motorcycle trail function, just the vehicle is different. They really ought to be the same highway tag. (This also argues against trying to add a “narrow_track” or something. Yes, “path” does a lot of lifting, but there’s lots of ways to specify the form to add to it.)

I need to remember this function, not form, also as the area National Forests send their “arterial routes” (National Forest highways) over low standard roads. Others before me went ahead and marked some “unclassified” as a demotion from “tertiary”. I can’t fault them, although maybe just over the area that is lesser standard. I did add a surface=dirt and smoothness=very_bad” and **tracktype=grade3 to maximize the hints that the road degrades over that segment.