In Germany and the Netherlands it is common practice to use bricks or tiles on some streets and cycle paths as a means to calm down traffic and make a distinction between "country" and "town". I've noticed that in c.t routes such stretches get highlighted in green if my preference is set to "any", which I thought would indicate that they're unpaved, but if I switch my preference to paved only, the route remains the same but the green color goes away. And a couple of looks at samples in Google streetview shows that this happens exactly on stretches that have tiles or bricks.
Now, I have no serious objection to this and I certainly don't mind riding on tiles, but I *do* dislike long stretches of gravel paths (or at least want to look at them in advance to assure myself that they're not too loose) so I'd really like if it were possible to somehow tell the difference between unpaved (gravel/dirt/sand) and tiles/bricks. I'm assuming this is all info that comes out of OSM so how is it classified there? Do they lump together tiles, bricks, gravel, dirt and sand as all the same? That would seem rather crude to me.
Edit: and what about cobbles?
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Could you give an example location?
OSM has a bewildering number of (often contradictory) ways to tag surfaces. cycle.travel tries to boil them down into understandable categories, but the whole area around cobbles/setts is tricky.
I've put an example called "Maastricht-Aachen" in my (no folder) folder.
It has a green section around 5 km, another around 10 km, a third a small distance before 15 km and a last one near the end, by Lemiers.
The funky bit is that some changes to the route make the green sections go away and then I can't make them reappear without loading the saved route again.
Again, this is not crucially important. And I can see how my attitude towards tiles and bricks with my 50 mm tires could be very different from that of some speed freak on tubulars. I'm just rather unhappy on sand and coarse railway ballast -type gravel.
Ah, I see. The surface was tagged in OSM as ‘paving_stones:30’, which means 30cm wide paving stones. Coincidentally I’ve recently added support for this in cycle.travel’s routing so it should show up as a paved surface in the next update!
That's great!
I first started paying attention to these details last summer when I noticed that my old Garmin Montana wouldn't let me pass through the town of Klütz in Germany if I'd set it to avoid gravel. But I'd gone the exact same way the year before so I knew there had to be something wrong. And sure enough, the main streets were lovely flathead cobbles - no problems whatsoever (with 50 mm tires).
Now, ROUNDHEAD cobbles would be a totally different matter...