My team noticed a large section of tracks marked abandoned in East Malaysia by user roadless1 and roadless2. A fair amount of them can be seen in this changeset here. It has the look of an import as the data bounds are square shaped. I’ve left a comment on the changeset but the account hasn’t had activity in two years so I don’t know if there will be a reply.
The geometry itself seems mostly ok, but I was curious if anyone has any knowledge of where this data comes from? How were these determined to be abandoned? For the most part the roads are still quite clear in available imagery so seemingly get some usage to maintain them free from vegetation.
The wiki says that abandoned:highways can have an additional highway tag, such as abandoned:highway=unclassified and highway=path showing that the usage as a road has ended but it is still available as a path. However, in my mind a track remains a track even if its no longer in major usage so I’m not sure an abandoned tag is appropriate.
Dunno for sure. One possibility, they were once timber hauling tracks but were left behind once the timber cutting lease expired. In that sense, these were abandoned by the timber company, the originator/builder of those tracks. However, quite a few will continue to be used by villagers/adventurers/hunters/poachers, and these people will at least kept fallen trees and shrubs clear from the tracks.
** Looks like you guys are going hog wild on those forest tracks!
So I guess they compare landsat imagery to determine disuse. Sounds like an interesting project, although landsat has a pretty limited resolution so the roads are a bit generic geometry wise and sometimes incorrect.
For now, my team will just leave them as is tag wise, although we’ll clean up some of the geometry and continue tagging our own roads as normal highway=tracks if there are no objections.
Yep, we’re cruising through East Malaysia. Since these are mostly plantation and forest tracks, our mapping guideline has been to add the major connecting roads as well as roads to structures, rather than adding every single possible track. Of course, if someone wanted to add in the rest, the data is available publicly in RapiD.
