Re automated changeset quality checkers: I believe I looked at one of these once and came away very dissatisfied with the whole business. When JOSM is telling me that there’s unnamed “residential” roads touching the slew of often unnamed residential roads I have just turned into named and numbered unclassified/track/service roads, I tend to say, “Yes, but this changeset is already obnoxiously large and I’m going to get those in the next one.” Even when I finish fixing those too, it still counts against me.

I’ve been known to add a ford where there is no waterway too, and that didn’t get fixed in the next go. Still seems important when an otherwise “good” road sets out across a river(!) without a bridge or even culvert. I tried to redirect one person’s attention to drawing the river to fix a ford issue instead, but I’m not diplomatic enough or they’re not interested in waterways. (If you’re a person interested in drawing waterways, here is a map of missing GNIS named waterways.)

Re improvements to the iD interface: The suggestion seems very verbose, which is rarely an effective strategy. Simply changing the order so that the “ignore” option comes first instead of last could be what someone needs to understand it is valid, not just tacked on as a last resort. The wording could be changed. “I don’t know” might work. Although the most honest, a lot of people are uncomfortable admitting it. “Cannot be determined at this time” might be effective. It’s getting wordy, but “cannot be determined” without the modifier is false.

Honestly, these are 100% well intentioned edits. The ones I’ve seen are using iD, so they’re operating under the pressure of a nag that inserts itself above the tag fields. After so long with sophisticated editors, they’re not going to see a lot of errors, so it’s quite understandable to interpret these “issues” as “errors”.

I live in the wild west and travel the wilder west, so there’s too much needing done to bother checking what is hopefully as good or better than I left it. A couple months ago I turned my attention to a Congressionally designated wilderness and booted the single “residential” road crossing it for three trails. Two of them do happen to follow within half a mile of where the road was drawn. For Trinity County, within half a mile can be pretty good. (Oh, the things I’ve seen in TIGER data…)

I just want these editors to consider “ignore” as a legitimate answer when they can’t find evidence for how a crossing occurs. This isn’t a natural inclination, after all. But the TL;DR of it all is: If it is important, it has to be correct. A guess isn’t good enough. If it is not important, it can wait until someone knowledgeable does it. A guess isn’t needed. So please, just hit that “ignore” rather than guess.

And now for the argument that comes down on the side of using “track”, because the writers of the ohv and orv wiki pages clearly come down on the side of using “track” for ATV and there’s even a little suggestion of using “track” for motorcycle trails. Okay, the ORV page explicitly suggests using “path” for motorcycle trails “as often width-restrictors and trail maintenance only extends to this narrow width to permit only these types of vehicles”. Same thing applies to ATV trails! Unlike the atv page, they do look like there’s been some thought going on in the writing. (Admittedly, OHV and ATV both have the same main author and ORV needs help with its conversions between inches and meters.)

[Oh, bother. I’ve forgotten the argument I formulated this morning. It was very convincing, I assure you. Besides, a “narrow_track” is, quite obviously, a track with a narrow “width” set. Obviously.]

And if the Hummer goes down that ATV trail on the east side of Pilot Creek, well, there’s one less Hummer on the road. It may be that “track” also does some heavy lifting, but no more than “path” even without these.

Some notes: Never “FS” in front of the reference number for a road. The usage is either “FR” for secondary roads (forest road/route), or “NF” for primary roads (forest highway/arterial). (See here.) These denote the road system. Trails don’t have these. Never “TR” or whatever else you are making up for the reference number of trails. It’s meaningless. References are usually supposed to only contain the number, but roads in the US have prefixes by custom. ATV trails are in the forest trail system, so should not get a prefix. That’s one way to tell the difference between the road you can drive and the road you have to get out and use your noisy, open vehicle on, at least in the National Forest. At least if people are following the convention.

Signage: Quite often it’s only the reference (sometimes in a shortened version leaving off the initial digits) that gets signed, so it’s important to use a renderer that displays references.

Aside: OHV vs ORV. Of course you only need one and of course it should be “ohv”. Most of these places still require users to be on designated routes and ORV suggests otherwise. Also, “ohv” is vastly more used.

“max_width” is a legal distinction. These roads are limited to 52” or less, so the trail is (hopefully) at least that wide. I’m not so sure that’s true on this trail across Pilot Creek in Six Rivers National Forest. However, there’s some in Los Padres National Forest that go across fire roads and the restriction is only imposed by a gate at the start.

And I see that’s been changed to “maxwidth” recently, and that seems to be the correct usage. Dude, poke me when I’m getting it wrong! I guess the user probably doesn’t know if I’m getting it consistently wrong or will even touch an ATV trail ever again. Also, those pokes can go either way easily. (User who added bridges to unknown stream crossings on a cheap secondary forest road that would never ever see one bridge, let alone four, didn’t seem to appreciate the poke…)

I’ll fix those in the next couple days. There haven’t been that many. Also edit this entry.

Function rather than form is what the “highway” tag is about, which brings me to another (but related) line of reasoning leading to “path” since the ATV trails function is fundamentally the same as the motorcycle trail function, just the vehicle is different. They really ought to be the same highway tag. (This also argues against trying to add a “narrow_track” or something. Yes, “path” does a lot of lifting, but there’s lots of ways to specify the form to add to it.)

I need to remember this function, not form, also as the area National Forests send their “arterial routes” (National Forest highways) over low standard roads. Others before me went ahead and marked some “unclassified” as a demotion from “tertiary”. I can’t fault them, although maybe just over the area that is lesser standard. I did add a surface=dirt and smoothness=very_bad” and **tracktype=grade3 to maximize the hints that the road degrades over that segment.

Okay, the forum looks like a scary place. I’m not even sure which category it goes in.

The toilets wiki page does actually contain “toilets:disposal=tank - a storage tank emptied by a pumping truck. Often used for portable toilets.” Was that there a while? I certainly have missed it until now. Perhaps “tank” is better than “vault” although “vault” is the standard on BLM and FS pages. Probably NPS and many state parks too. Or perhaps “vault” is better as it is a buried tank. Perhaps tank is trying to not refer to a buried tank?

Current usage according to overpass: 24 tanks, 8 vaults.

Anyway, I shall approach it from the wiki talk page instead.

I have met a couple fiberglass installations, but almost all are the solid iron and concrete pieces from Spokane. Dates on them from a couple years ago or a couple decades, it’s all the same except for the number of coats of paint. I know one that’s survived a couple small debris flows. It might be a biffy, but it’s not a pitlatrine.

Okay, I’ll take it to the forum. Really I will. Thanks for the validation!

Mapnik has it’s support behind natural=massif as well. It renders. Not quite the way I would want, but if I zoom in far enough, it says Mount Lassic. Taginfo indicates Dianacht Topo uses it (area only), OpenTopoMap (area or way), and OsmAnd (all).

I saw in the discussion that got the wiki entry that it wasn’t linked to peak on purpose. Perhaps it would be okay after all. Hill is linked, and what good is that? Prominence is not although it is the better answer to the linked enhancement proposal. (The people saying it can just be calculated: PeakVisor says they recalculate for their ~1M peaks every time there’s a better elevation model and it takes a little over a day. All to save a tag?)

I like an area. It maintains itself as to included peaks. It is straightforward.

As to verifiability, it is verifiable that there’s a thing there that a user of map data might want to consider, it’s just the edges that are difficult. They also lack importance. A valley goes from ridge to ridge, but it is only the bottom of it that people want labeled or to consider as the valley. Sometimes “around here” is actually okay.

Looks like someone has dropped in a wiki page for natural=massif stating that it is for this specific purpose. (Born November 2023.) The abandoned proposal indicates it’s more of a small range. The dictionary definition is a “compact cluster of mountains” but dictionaries can be rather imprecise with their language. My fuzzy feel for what a “massif” is suggests it might be applicable. It’s got 26 uses to natural=mountain’s 20 uses! The wiki editor has unilaterally (I’m being presumptuous) decided that it should only be applied to areas. Areas was all I was thinking until this first comment mentioning that they could be points. I have to admit, points maybe should be valid.

By the wiki, natural=peak should only be applied to points. In spite of the 115 ways this does seem the right and good way. Most of what I clicked on were indistinct bumps, often in parks. I’m willing to just shuffle these examples into the “wrong” category. Sticking a point in the middle would do as well. Better since it would be rendered.

One could decide that peak should just get extended, as this example shows with Wilderness Peak surrounded by Andrew Nyman Mountain, both natural=peak. This would preclude mapping a mountain/massif as a single point. Oh, dear, take it to the extreme and you don’t need mountain_range. Just draw ever bigger “peak” contours for each level of range. However, I would prefer not to conflate the concepts. Peak is a point where every direction is downhill. It can be as minor or major as you like.

@SK53 Those seem to generally be kludges to make things render. I’ve hit a few possible nails with the “locality” hammer, too. Hopefully they were applicable.

As I sit here shuffling thoughts around for the comment, I think I might just put some momentum behind the massif. It feels like it would have fewer problems with people trying to promote their peak just because it “feels more important”.

Because the fungus that kills Port Orford Cedars also affects tanoaks quite badly, the parks of the Midpeninsula Regional Parks (south of San Francisco, California) have provided boot scrapers at a number of their trailheads. Knocking the mud off prevents the spread and saves their tanoaks, or so they hope. These aren’t associated with any entrances, but they did all have information signs they would be right or left of. They weren’t quite as cool as these, either.

Arg. My markup never gets not rusty. Where’s the edit button for a comment? Delete?

A corral is a type of paddock, so tag it as such:
landuse=animal_keeping
animal_keeping:type=paddock
animal_keeping=horse;cow;sheep (delete or add as appropriate)

If it is for temporary accommodation for stock at a trailhead or campground or similar, add
tourism=trail_riding_station

I expect it’s a good idea to mark the fence. If a renderer doesn’t know what to do with the above, maybe it’ll still show a fence, which a human looking at it might still get the information that there’s a small fenced area for temporary stock holding.
barrier=fence

This has been in need of a final summary.

A corral is a type of paddock, so tag it as such: landuse=animal_keeping animal_keeping:type=paddock animal_keeping=horse;cow;sheep (delete or add as appropriate)

If it is for temporary accommodation for stock at a trailhead or campground or similar, add: tourism=trail_riding_station

I expect it’s a good idea to mark the fence. If a renderer doesn’t know what to do with the above, maybe it’ll still show a fence, which a human looking at it might still get the information that there’s a small fenced area for temporary stock holding. barrier=fence

An example at Lovers Camp Trailhead. Hopefully that’s not too much to hang on a few nodes.

@SomeoneElse Yeah, you’re supposed to tell someone when you should be back and where you’re going in between. Some people leaves detailed itineraries in an envelope in the car. (SNR mentioned you can even do a foil print of your shoes so they can track you when they chatted with our Girl Scout troop.) I’m not so good at doing that, so an entry without an out date in a trail register and an apparently abandoned car might be the last anyone ever knows of me.

Looks like information=route_marker has a few more uses. But a trail register as trail marker isn’t directional, so it would really only be information=trail_blaze. (It’s not just for blazed trees! Although pretty sure I’m one of the misusers of this in the past.)

Okay, I don’t like box. It doesn’t feel right.

amenity=animal_hitch
animal_hitch=corral
horse=yes

Yes. That feels right. One can think of a corral as a hitch? Right? Maybe it takes the abstract “horse parking” step in between to make it make sense. Baby steps. A hitch is a place to tether the animal. Which is to say, immobilize it within a small space. It’s just a looser tethering to have a small box of fencing with a gate on one side. Right?

I would expect to see camping=no on half the city parks if it was getting much use. (Keeping in mind it likely applies to most city parks.) The statistics I saw put it at a little over 1000. That’s minute compared to what it could be. It has not raised itself to “de-facto”. There’s actually more using the key “camp” than “camping”, usually with “yes”, but no one has documented that. (I would support camping over camp for this use. I don’t know what they are using it for.)

Currently, values with the camping key are mostly “no” (848) followed by “dispersed” (215) and “yes” (52). The value “dispersed” probably deserves a better explanation than “there is use”. There should be something that distinguishes dispersed from yes as well.

I found the proposal page via the “what links here” tool on the left of the page. It is sometimes amusing and often informative to look at this automatically generated page. It is also how I confirmed that I hadn’t just missed the link from camp_site when I failed to find it the first time.

Why I wouldn’t use camping=designated is due to the parallels of how “designated” is used. If I have a highway=path marked foot=yes, then I know I am allowed to walk along it. If it is marked foot=designated, then I know it was built for that purpose. It is a stronger form of “yes”. I would expect to find an area that is reserved for camping over other uses, which isn’t what I’m trying to capture. These places where specific sites have been marked in an area that otherwise allows dispersed camping are generally where there was overuse before. The marked sites are usually to consolidate the impact to smaller areas and enforce greater distances between camps. It reduces the area getting used for camping. Other people have used “designated” (21) and “designated_-_fee” (29), but I have not determined what their purpose was.

A possible better tag might be camping=sites. A more long winded possibility might be camping=designated_sites_only. This would be for an area that is not a campground but has had camping limited to designated sites, as is the situation at certain lakes in Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness and yellow post sites. That is different from marking the whole of, say, Sue-meg State Park (California) where camping is allowed in developed campgrounds only, by the density of the sites. One might mark such a place as camping=developed_only. I don’t see being default as much of an argument against.

And, yes, this is getting to the point where it should be stuck on the forum rather than a diary post. I was really attempting to gather thoughts and leave an opening for someone to say “there already is one” prior to making a post. Also, I’ve not actually signed up for the forum yet. Once upon a time, I was on Usenet, but I was getting too emotionally tied up in things there and it was unhealthy. That probably won’t happen on an OSM forum. One would hope. I hadn’t realized this got featured. People do seem to use their diary for full on research papers sometimes. That’s the sort of thing that should be getting featured, surely.

@giggls: I wasn’t finding difference in the “bugs” listed for sites marked with and without red bangs. I’ll look more closely. Maybe play with getting the tagging more complete in some local areas and see how it looks an hour later.

Here are more suggestions for rendering a no camping area: Wallpaper the area with tents marked with a red circle with a line through it. (But these aren’t universal no signs?) Decorate the area with red exes over the usual tent wallpaper similar to paths and roads that are not for public use.

@giggls: Looks like an alright map. The legend doesn’t tell me what red ! marks mean.

I didn’t mark any with tourism=camp_site + access=no since that seems to capture that no one is allowed entry, which is inaccurate, but there is camping somehow. That and any map not understanding would likely explicitly mark it to encourage camping rather than discourage made it far too unappealing.

@Matija Nalis: This does appear to be a good tag, but with some reservations. I see it has few uses now and is only ranked “in use”. That usually indicates it has never been proposed or discussed, just added to the wiki. There does seem to be a proposal page for the wiki, too, but it has no information. I’m not sure of the usual process of this. In order to gain visibility, it should be marked under “see also” on tourism=campsite.

I personally would want more than “yes” or “no”. There is already a mention of “dispersed” getting used, which is much better to use on large areas than “yes” in my view. (But perhaps this is emotion rather than reason. Can I argue this?) I would also want something for “in designated sites only” for forests that have “yellow post sites” or the examples in Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness above. The word “designated” wouldn’t cut it since it has different implications.

Anyway, although the camping key needs discussed and expanded, it is sufficiently satisfying to me to start using on the forbidden sites at least.

@giggls So red areas where there are camping=no tags?

The wiki page doesn’t mention this, but “tourism=trail_riding_station” is an inactive tag. The proposal makes it clear this should be applied to any place giving accommodation to visiting horses.

Talk under amenity=hitching_post suggests amenity=horse_parking + horse_parking=box (see trail riding station for a picture of a box, it says). Although it says horse parking was already in the database, it redirects to amenity=animal_hitch, use access tags to say which animal (horse=designated), and the more elaborate parking of a “box” no longer has room. Or perhaps it does with a little imagination: animal_hitch=corral (vs. ring, rail, or post). (Or box as suggested, or fenced.)

These are amenities in current use, not just historic artifacts. I expect that the corrals by trailheads and in campgrounds host horses, mules, llamas, goats, donkeys, and a few others I’ve not thought of. The one at Soap Creek Corral (linked above) had two mules and a horse. One of the mules was very particular about when breakfast should be and kicked the metal bars when it was late. The sheep corral on Lizard Head Pass (linked above) is part of open grazing that currently occurs and the sheep get rounded up into it every year. I believe they start there when they are brought up in the spring, too. Here’s information on open grazing in Klamath National Forest, including rangeland maps. It’s not related to the sheep, just one I know has online information.

“Sheepfolds” are definitely a good clue and the article you linked is helpful. (I can confirm it’s not a word in much use is the USA.) There are a few places called “stone corral” and I can think of one actual stone corral in the Flat Tops Wilderness in Colorado which looks a lot like these. It is also historic, but there was unlikely to be a homestead nearby. It’s in the one area where it’s hard to find water. It’s very like “on the high fell” and perhaps was for shelter rather than rounding up. The article mentions “gathering pens” on “otherwise unenclosed land”, which is a very close parallel to corrals of the second sort on National Forest land. We have a lot of open grazing and the fees vastly undercut ranchers, so it’s not likely to stop.

That help link describes some of the problems with the mapping. Like the sheepfolds have been mapped as stone walls, the corrals have been mapped as fence. However, just showing that there’s an arrangement of fence it’s very good for someone searching for what that arrangement of fence builds. It makes a good case for using a “man_made” tag.

USGS even fails a bit at capturing the current homesteads. I decided to hike a little way up a river fork and see what might be of an old grave they had marked. I walked around one ranch to the site between two more ranches only to find there was another ranch in between.

Anyway, I’ve made the mistake of poking around Overpass to see what people are using “trail_riding_station” for. Someone in Riverside, California has used it for staging locations that are probably day use only, judging by how much urban is nearby. I’m sure that’s similar to OHV staging in that it just accommodates a trailer so you can park and get out your toys/animals. There’s no temporary accommodation. A lot of buildings (stables?) and arenas have the tag in Europe. I see whole compounds that offer trail riding to the public tagged as this. Maybe, as it is a “tourism” tag, this is what it was meant to be? If so, that isn’t captured by the wiki entry. There’s one probable swimming pool in Texas.

I should probably wander over to the forum and make an attempt there.

Oh, and I guess my answer is: the point of view of the greatest number of users. But that might be a little more abstract than “ground truth” suggests at first.

Seriously, that’s a road. I could see the tread marks from the last drivers of it. Anyone standing there looking at it without further information would say “road”. But I can see where it may be more important to call it a path.

I’d found good use with ctrl allowing me to click near other nodes without connecting to them and was going to try that on the next need. So alt instead…