Again, trying to be fair to the FB contributors, part of the problem is that even among ourselves there is confusion and disagreement about what exactly defines a “track”. We’ve had several long discussions in this forum that really haven’t cleared things up. I took a quick look at several areas in both provinces mentioned by Tom just to assess the problem from my standpoint. What I see are many ways classified as tracks that I would tag differently. I would probably be using either unclassified or service for most of them. I also saw instances that their AI couldn’t resolve; road hidden by trees, a road near another way that obscures it e.g., a canal, and of course surfaces. Also, many ways sometimes end unexpectedly when it’s quite apparent that they continue.
Even with these errors and oversights, their contributions nevertheless result in our being able to see a highway of some sort. It’s a lot easier to promote a track to a service road than to draw the entire way ourselves. I have done this for countless ways that members of our group had originally tagged as tracks. Consequently, overall, I’d still rather have FB’s help than not have it.
One suggestion that appeared earlier in this thread that I’ll put into practice during my own armchair mapping sessions is to tag most of the ways for which the surface is hard to determine as “unpaved”. I used to leave surface untagged in those cases but now I think it’s better to err on the side of caution while mapping rural areas. Someone can always upgrade the way and/or retag its surface after doing a ground survey.
Rather than get into a pissing match with the FB team, IMO we can better spend our energy trying to clarify the use of the track tag and when to choose it over other tags. To me, it’s obvious that FB isn’t going away any time soon so we might as well get used to working with them or, on occasion, around them if it comes to that. I hate the thought of losing two mega OSM contributors during this scuffle but if you, Tom and Russ, can’t be persuaded to continue working, what else can be done?
Regards,
Dave