[Tagging] [Talk-us] Rails with trails

[Phil! Gold]

* Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> [2012-07-03 17:22 +1000]:
> For the original question of how to tag a "rail with trail" (I've also
> heard the term "railside trail"), is it not sufficient to simply map
> the two ways separately? Example here:
> http://osm.org/go/uG4lkKxG?layers=C

As I understand it, NE2 was looking for a tagging scheme that would allow
for searches to find trails on a railway grade.  Searching for rail trails
is obviously easy; just look for railway=abandoned with a relevant
highway= tag.  But as things stand now, searching for railside trails is
hard; you have to find a pair of ways, one tagged highway= and the other
tagged railway=, that are roughly parallel to each other.  That's a very
complicated search to make, even working from a geodatabase.  Adding
another tag to the trails would make such searches much more feasible.