So, how to map race tracks? Well, use highway=raceway but there’s a little more to it than that. not complicated, but the details can matter. This diary entry covers my own approach, which I think is a good one, but there’s always a chance of disagreement.

highway=raceway itself

Like any highway= tag, raceway is for a linear, possibly closed way. A closed raceway is not a polygon, as such usage would be difficult for data consumers to distinguish from an actual closed way such as an oval track. If you want to specify the width of a racetrack, there is a width tag. It does not seem widely used, but it is documented in the OSM wiki. It’s in meters, by the way. Specifying lanes=2 can be a reasonable thing for a Drag Strip as an alternative.

I only use highway=raceway for hot areas. Hot areas are the parts of the race track which are restricted to folks with special credentials - race and track officials, drivers, and designated crew. Regular ticker buyers are not permitted into these areas and most of them involve cars traveling at speed.

access roads and parking

For generalized access roads, highway=service is appropriate. For obvious reasons, use amenity=parking for the race paddock and any spectator parking. Use name to specify what type of parking and possibly designate specific purposes; Lime Rock Park and Thompson Speedway both have similar names for their two paddock spaces, the blindingly obvious “A Paddock” and “B Paddock”. The road from the end of a Drag Strip shutdown area back to the paddock is often referred to as a “return road” and that’s how I name them.

access

For operating race tracks access should probably be private, as a purchased or comped ticket, or official credentials are required for access.

oneway?

Most race tracks are oneway. Drag strips and ovals, always. You can tell which is the start end of the drag strip by the black burnout marks. US ovals are always run counter-clockwise, that is, you are always turning left.

Road courses are mostly one way, which has to do with barrier type and configuration. Road courses that can be legitimately run in either direction are very rare. In the North East US, Palmer Motorsports Park is the only one I am aware of which can use either direction. oneway=reversible is the correct tag to use in such cases. But if you see guardrail barriers it cannot be run in either direction.

variants and names

If the race track only has one variation (common for Ovals and Drag Strips), then I set name to the current name of the track in OSM. in OHM I use the best known or last used name. Since OHM records history (which OSM mostly does not), I may list other known names in the OHM wiki entry on the race track.

Some courses have a lot of variation. The history of tracks such as Riverside (in California) and Thompson (in Connecticut) is particularly complex. The natural way to resolve this is with relations. I currently use the type=circuit relation, but it’s only a proposal that has some age on it.

A case can be made for making race circuits a subtype of the route relation. I think I like the route relation subtype better, quite frankly, but I haven’t made time for a proposal. Here is a link to my leaflet widget based map of Thompson so you can play with the layers control in the upper right and see what I get from using relations: Thompson Speedway

start_date and end_date

I add start_date in OSM, and start_date and end_date in OHM whenever possible. I have a reference libarary available to me that lets me figure out (at least to the year) for nearly all of the tracks in the US and Canada, and am happy to respond to research requests for this sort of thing. In OHM, license= and source= tags are strongly recommend, with the OHM preference for license being CC0. This is one difference between OSM and OHM, and is also a reason why copying geometry from OSM to OHM for defunct tracks can be problematic. Think before you copy and consider alternative approaches (but that’s another diary entry.)

specifying sources for data in OHM

For OHM sources, I maintain a directory in the OHM section of the OSM wiki of “Ghost Tracks” I have entered into OHM, and i set the source tag to the URL of the appropriate entry in that directory.

a style problem

Now for the joker in the deck - this tagging scheme works well with the older OSM style, but has issues with the newer version carto. The short version is that the rendering of raceway right now is almost invisible so the track can’t be seen well but the service roads can be. I have not altered my tagging (yet) but instead am going to be bringing my concerns to the talk list in a few days, to see what the authors of the stylesheet are thinking and whether they have considered this. Because nobody should be tagging just for the renderer.