winter roads, and ice roads

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.

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

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?

I’ve started voting on this feature.

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

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