[Tagging] highway=footway - Advanced definition: Distinction footway vs path

[Ilpo Järvinen]

On Thu, 6 Aug 2015, Greg Troxel wrote:

> 
> Ilpo Järvinen <ilpo.jarvinen at helsinki.fi> writes:
> 
> > You seem to admit that there's need for some hierarchy, however, on the 
> > same time you seem to oppose the idea that such hierarcy would exists 
> > based on physical properties (man-made vs informal). I find it strange 
> > since it shouldn't be that hard to come up use cases where excluding or 
> > warning the user about informal paths is very useful thing. In order to 
> > make mappers to tag that differentiation, I think that the default 
> > stylesheet should visualize this difference somehow.
> 
> There are two issues. One is the physical aspect, and I think you
> overweight how much people care about that.  Or rather, people
> understand that trails through the forest are not usually paved.

It's not just about paved/unpaved. What I mean that there are two kinds of 
"not paved trails through forest". Those which come with man applied 
surface, even if we tag them as surface=unpaved (typically 
surface=fine_gravel to be more precise), which tends to be rather level 
and easy to walk on and reasonably free from obstacles, and those where 
the conditions are close to unknown (given unfamiliar terrain), might be 
easy/ok but might as well require negotiating tricky parts or even 
backtracking. It's important aspect for (non-computerized) routeplanning 
to know this difference.


-- 
 i.