Include man_made=snow_fence?

[westnordost]

Quite well used already (4600 times), see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dsnow_fence

Usage doubled in the last two years.

[quincylvania]

Hmm looking more into this, there appear to be several other ways people are tagging these. (Some might be used in combination with each other or tags like barrier=fence.)

Uses	Tag
6270	barrier=avalanche_protection
4693	man_made=avalanche_protection
3616	avalanche_protection=snow_bridge
1867	fence:function=avalanche
1530	fence=avalanche
181	barrier=avalanche_barrier
135	avalanche_barrier=snow_bridge
131	barrier=snow_fence
71	avalanche_protection=snowbridge

Seems like the kind of thing that iD could help standardize by having a preset.

[westnordost]

Oof.
I found this article on the wiki:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Avalanche_protection

I live on the flat land, so I am not a specialist in what might be synonymous and what not. Though one thing the article claims is

Existing tagging: barrier=snow_fence. AVOID confusing snow fences with avalanche barriers.

🤷

[SK53]

@westnordost: thanks for this reminder I've expanded the article a little bit.

Usefully there are many references to snow fences in the mid-West which is notoriously "flat as a pancake", but it is also used for the Schneezahn avalanche protection. So the phrase refers to two concepts. The difficulty of finding the precise term & a variety of difficult to name avalanche barriers was one reason to prefer the more generic term.

[tyrasd]

There should be two presets: one for snow fences (to manage snow drift) and one for snow bridges (protecting against avalanches). The question remains if we should use the man_made primary key for both snow_fence and avalanche_protection, even tough barrier=avalanche_protection is slightly more often used¹. 🤔

Footnotes

1. PS: relatively many (3557 out of 5265 and 6848 respectively) ways are currently mapped with both the man_made and barrier tag having the value avalanche_protection. ↩