Mapping Smoothness Tag for Surface Paving Stones

General talk
1

Hey there!
I have got a question and a suggestion of mapping roads with surface=paving_stones and their corresponding smoothness.

My goal is to allow cycling paving stones with a race bike, wherever the paving stones are of good quality. I found no real information about that specific mapping, as the wiki mostly relates to asphalt roads.

So here is my suggestion:

  1. Excellent - Seamless connecting, flat paving stones with no straight lines.
  2. Good - Mostly seamless and flat connecting paving stones or like 1/Excellent but with straight lines
  3. Intermediate - Loosy Paving stones or like 2/Good but with larger straight lines
  4. Bad - Usually cobblestone I’d say

The idea is:
Inline skaters will need very close paving stones and no straight lines. If it got straight lines, you will very likely crash. You can tolerate that for a few meters, but not for longer roads.
Race Bikes can deal with mostly good paving roads and can tolerate some loosy stone roads for a few meters.

I do understand that routers will not route race bikes through paving stones if there is an asphalt road nearby. But sometimes it just makes sense to use a paving_stones bicycle way, as it is more safe, and if the road is of good smoothness, there is no reason to avoid it. At least if you are not cycling as a professional with super high speed (like when bikepacking).

So is my understanding correct? If yes, I’d like to take some example pictures and would like to add them to the wiki. Since this is a very common attribute (i guess), I would like to ask first, before I edit anything on the wiki (if I am even allowed to, I dont know yet). I think it makes sense to add that information, so smoothness tagging of paving_stones can be taken with more care.

Thanks for all your feedback!

2

I think smoothness is the most important Tag. But the type of surface is easier to tag because it is more obvious. Smoothness depends on personal assessment. But a router can only estimate a surface quality from the surface. surface=paving_stones is usually smothness=good or intermediate in my experience. But in case of bad path conditions it can be worse.

What exactly do you want to do?

3

I would like to provide more example pictures, so people have a reference for their mappings. I find the examples on the smoothness page very good, but they mostly focus on asphalt roads. Also people who are not using inliners might not know that a paving_stones road with straight lines is not excellent, as it is super dangerous to drive there with a lot of speed. I’d like to precise the text and add more pictures.

Is that a good idea?

4

Yes, I think so. Maybe you post the pictures here or in the discussion-page of the wiki first.

5

Alright! So let me collect some pictures :slight_smile:

6

There is similar work being done for StreetComplete that you could probably coordinate/reuse: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/pull/3257#issuecomment-919478758

7

Also, the work being done in STreetComplete is (partly) based on

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Berlin/Verkehrswende/smoothness