Proposal talk:Surface:all weather

General notes

IMHO surface=paved/unpaved are already to be considered deprecated. Please use more specific values (asphalt, dirt, cobblestone, etc.) if possible, and see below in the proposal for some of the suggested values (e.g. I don't agree in all categorization you did, IMHO grass_paver is a paved value, but it really doesn't matter as long as you tag what is there). -- Dieterdreist 13:36, 6 September 2010 (BST)

Deprecation

Telling people that surface=unpaved is/should be deprecated is more than likely going to be ignored by a great many mappers. This tag is in far too widespread use by far too many people. You could of course (after this somehow got voted through) write on the wiki page of surface=* that it is deprecated, but that would just be another example of the wiki not reflecting what is really in the database. --Cartinus 21:42, 6 September 2010 (BST)

Agree with that. Value "unpaved" should remain. Everything else in the proposal looks OK. -- Zkir 12:32, 20 September 2010 (BST)

Redundance

all_weather seems to be redundant tag. The better way is usage of more exact compacted/gravel and so on tags instead of using both paved and proposed all_weather tags. Wowik 16:43, 20 September 2010 (BST)

Naming

"all_weather" is not good name enough for such a tag value. Asphalt road for example can be used in all weather conditions also. It leads to misunderstanding of the meaning of the value. I think most of OSM mappers will not start to read wiki when meet all_weather in OSM data to understand its meaning. I think "improved" would be much better name. Such name implies some question "What is it improved to compare with?" So mappers should read the wiki to understand the meaning. Wowik 08:14, 21 September 2010 (BST)

Wrong Category

all_weather is not at all a category of a physical surface description. What you want to express is: Is a given way that has a surface X usable for some activity Y when we have a whethercondition of Z. There is no satisfying solution for this type of information since years, but surface=all_weather will not solve any of this problems. In addition it's missleading, cause even the best highways with surface=paved , smoothness=exellent are unusable for normal cars if they are flooded. So, the proposed ontologie of surface categories is just wrong. If you want to tag ways according to there usability, have a look at the smoothness tag and the track_type=grade1-5 tag (and the controverse discussions of them).

surface=ice_road is just a little bit unprecise, cause you either say surface=ice or highway=ice_road. But this is o.k. for me. Hasemann 12:50, 30 September 2010 (BST)

Indeed, "passable in every weather" is not a surface, but a property in itself. I won't bother suggesting anything clever straight away; one would have to think through different weather conditions, which can affect the usability of a way and propose something that handles all those situations - and whether it's different for cars, pedestrians and all others. But hey, start with for example nice_in_rain=yes just to record the data. Alv 17:54, 12 August 2011 (BST)