Reporter: Davo
[Submitted to the original trac issue database at 6.11pm, Tuesday, 11th December 2012]

Hi Folks, I would like to bring to your attention the fact that the slippery map on the main OSM website does not render the 4wd_only tag.

As this tag is applied to roads that can be dangerous to the unwary, this is quite a risky situation. Here, in Australia, we are lucky enough to have a large number of accessible 4wd roads and many show up on OSM.

Further, routing tools are starting to appear that many people allow to make decisions for them. Sadly. In the Aussie press at the moment are a number of potentially life threatening situations relating to people using Apple's mapping tools. You and I agree they are silly people but the press and the police just blame Apple. I don't want to see OSM in that position.

I have spoken to the developers of one of the better routing engines and their view is that a tag that does not make it to the OSM Reference Implementation, that is, the slippery map on the main web page, is not important enough to worry them. Oh dear !

When approved, the 4wd_only=yes tag was intended to be rendered by adding the text "(4wd Only)" to the road name. That would be a good model ! But note that since that tag was approved, the need for finer granularity has emerged and there has been a lot of use of the 4wd_only=recommended. It would be worth observing that too. (Indeed, planning for the future, 4wd_only=extreme might happen).

And please don't assume this relates to only roads declared highway=track. We have many roads that need to be primary or secondary (because of their purpose) but are 4wd only.

Note that this ticket has a lot of similarities to #1447, I added a comment there too.

Guys, lets be clear here, this is a dangerous situation !

David