When riding our motorcycles on a route planned with Kurviger with explicit settings "Avoid unpaved and narrow roads - level 5) we ended up on a 30 KM (!) enduro/trial type of “road”. We did not know how long it would take us so we “drove” on. It was quite a heroic ordeal with 2 heavy bikes (BMW R1300 GS). I wonder why this happened as we clearly planned for no unpaved or narrow roads. Location of the road : 39,06017° N, 21,56653° E
No wonder there was no Street View of Google Earth Street view available !
The route (example: https://kurv.gr/VxvN9) is mostly defined as “unclassified,” so Kurviger assumes that it is not “unpaved” …
Btw: a R1300GS is the right bike for these streets!
No surface information is maintained, therefore no chance for Kurviger to filter this road.
You can switch to satellite view, then you see the surface in such remote areas.
When you plan in the Webplanner “w” hides the route, so you have a better look at the map. More keyboard shortcuts.
Hello @tokn59,
Of course, that’s upsetting to hear and with the selected settings “avoid unpaved and narrow roads”, it’s definitely not something you would expect.
That is the problem: Such cases are difficult to detect automatically, especially in regions where OSM data is incomplete or not up to date.
For future tours, it can help to quickly check satellite view in very remote areas and spot-check the GPX track in rural regions. Please also feel free to report sections that seem to be incorrect in the map data here in the forum, as feedback like this helps to improve the map data.
If you ever find yourself unexpectedly facing an off-road trail, this feature will come in handy.
Yes, I did check satellite view but it was impossible to see any detail of the road because of the low resolution. Maybe there’s a (future) possibility to mark such roads (as “suspect”) if it’s “unclassified” ?
How would this help? A “unclassified” road can have different surfaces, dependant on available money / country. The better way is to look at the road then tag the surface in OSM. Therefore a unclassified road should always have a surface tag. Probably the road was taken also from a satellite picture and the mapper had the same issue.
Remote areas are adventures.
Btw. @linux-user added already “unpaved” for this road.
A while back, I had this discussion on another forum. My suggestion to classify “unclassified” roads as ‘unpaved’ by default (based on several routes in Albania) was rightly rejected, because a Scottish user was able to prove that in Great Britain, most “unclassified” roads are paved…
So the only option left is to tag the individual routes with the “Surface” tag. (By the way, I would have expected the ACT folks to do this for their tracks.)
I’ve just read through it again. For Spain, it seems we can assume that ‘unclassified’ means ‘paved’ (though this is likely due to historical reasons, as the description in the OSM Wiki was misleading). Otherwise, ‘track’ is probably used there.
The Greek page on “unclassified” states:
As physical characteristics vary from region to region and the assumptions a data user might make in an urban or rural context differ, it is helpful to explicitly highlight certain road attributes.
So the typical tags such as “surface”, “width”, “tracktype” etc.
