[Tagging] Subject: Feature Proposal - RFC - highway=social_path

[Greg Troxel]

John Willis <johnw at mac.com> writes:

> I can go to a nice park in San Diego and walk along a nice
> highway=footway with my 68 year old mother and my friend in a
> wheelchair and my little cousin on a push bicycle. Surface=dirt.
>
> Go try to do any of those on either path I linked. There were
> (honestly) 60 year old ladies with little hats and hiking boots there,
> with their trekking poles and goretex uppers, looking for birds,
> delivered there by a tour bus . But there is no way that those routes
> should have their differences *defined* by tags that can be used to
> define a characteristic of any other tag. They have completely
> different expectations of usage and conditions.

Earlier I objected to highway=trail, and I'd like to point out that it
was in the context of the main/access discussion.   The notion of

  highway=trail
    for being in a mostly natural area with a place you can walk

  highway=path (and footway/cycleway/bridleay)
    for being in a landscaped and managed area, or a walking area that
    is managed/landscaped through a natural area, where the walking you
    do is more like paved or really nice dirt surface

seems mostly reasonable to me.  But it's entirely separate from the
main/not distinction and I think from the others.

The other problems are

  While there are examples that sort neatly into these two cases, surely
  there are hard cases.  That's not so bad, except that there are surely
  areas with some on either side of the line in no clearly-designed
  pattern, and it will be very messy to label them.

  OSM doesn't really deal well with this sort of tag splitting, because
  the renderers won't render until the tag is widely used, and no one
  will use it if it doesn't show up on the default render, mapquest,
  osmand, mkgmap, etc.


I wonder if this is sort of like tracktype, which labels tracks in
grades.  I find that awkward because 1-5 doesn't mean much to me and I
have to look it up every time.  But overall I think that if we have have
a path=
  city,
  wheelchair-ok,
  walker-ok,
  cane-ok,
  dress-shoes-ok
  sneakers-ok,
  hiking-boots-ok,
  boots-and-pole-ok,
  scrambling,
  technical-climbing

sort of thing, that might address most of the issues in a
backwards-compatible way.  That's probably not the right list - just an example.
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