I’ve created a set of tiles from US Forest Service road data for the 155 US National Forests.

This is to help with TIGER fixup in these rural areas, where tracks, trails and entirely non-existent paths are often tagged with a bare “highway=residential”. The US Forest Service data is greatly superior to the original TIGER data and has metadata on surface type/quality, but is unsuitable for automatic import into OSM because it would overwrite mappers’ existing work in these areas.

You can access the tiles at:

and they’re included in the editor-imagery-index list used by P2, iD and Vespucci. The tiles are available up to z19. Use of Potlatch 2’s new floating imagery window mode is recommended, so that you can work from both Bing imagery and these tiles at the same time.

You can also explore from the comfort of your browser at http://osm.cycle.travel/index.html, where there’s an “Edit this area in OpenStreetMap” link at the bottom right.

Key

Surface: yellow outline = paved grey outline = gravel

Road type: white with black casing = paved road dashed grey = gravel road suitable for cars dashed brown = dirt road dotted grey = not maintained for cars

Maintenance level: grey dots = 4x4 only green dots = usable by cars black dots = moderately comfortable for cars black frequent dots = very comfortable for cars

Points of interest: car = roadside park flag = Forest Service station ski = winter recreation area hiker = trailhead campsite = campsite picnic site = picnic site



(There’s some degree of overlap, but this is present in the original USFS data.)

When fixing up data, I would suggest the following tags as a minimum:

highway=unclassified - paved road

highway=unclassified, surface=unpaved/gravel/dirt - unpaved road suitable for cars

highway=service - road to isolated dwelling or other building

highway=track - unpaved track or road suitable for 4x4s

highway=path - narrow linear clearing, too narrow for motor vehicles

[delete entirely] - raw TIGER data with no signs of track or path in either imagery or Forest Service tiles

US Forest Service data is public domain so there’s no need for further attribution when using this data, though a source= tag is always good practice.

Hope these are helpful, and let me know of any further suggestions.