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In Ontario, Canada, are forest access roads that are "use at your own risk" wanted in OSM? These roads are used by the public for hiking, biking, ATVing and for general access to back-country crown land areas for camping, hunting, fishing and other recreation. I have put a few in but they were soon deleted with the note "not public". I would like to know if there is any consensus on putting them in OSM or not. |
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OSM is perfectly fine with data that is "not public" - for example, people trace the path network on school campuses, inside commercial facilities, or even details of military facilities from aerial imagery. You should perhaps spend some thought on what tags to use though; from what you say it appears that these roads are public (they don't say "access with permission only" or so), but perhaps there's a good way to express the "use at own risk" feature. You might want to check with the Canadian mailing list - there are a bunch of people there who don't read this forum regularly. |
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Yes, anything that's physically there should be entered correctly into OSM. You probably want to check with the local community to see how other roads like this are tagged. You don't want to imply that a dirt track is a primary class road! Some router might route people over it when it shouldnt. |
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The roads should be on the map. |
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As Frederik Ramm said, all roads should be mapped. Period. Weather they have access=no is a different story, but I'd inform the DataWorkingGroup and they might undo his deletes or ban him or inform him that what he's doing is wrong. |
Thanks for the answers to my question.
Regarding attribution, I contacted the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and was told the following:
the public can use any road on crown land that is not signed as "restricted due to ongoing or past resource extraction activity".
the public can use roads that go through private property as long as they are used (like an easement?) to access the crown or private lands on the other side of the private property.
I have now received word from officials at the Ontario Ministry that the previous advice was unfounded.
THERE IS NO "RIGHT OF PASSAGE" OVER PRIVATE LANDS ON OLD FOREST ACCESS ROADS OR TRAILS.
This should get reflected in the access tag of the corresponding roads. Nevertheless they should be contained in OSM.