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

[John Willis]

> On Jun 14, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A path through a park is not so substantially different from a trail in my eyes, there can be bigger differences among different trails alone for instance.

This is a fundamental disagreement between us. I will supply some local pictures this week to illustrate my point. 

There is a little grey area in surface smoothness - but expected conditions, assumed usage, and what is implied by rendering are vastly different. A narrow motorway is a spacious and smooth service road: the road condition may be similar, but the usage and assumed standards are very different - and confusing a motorway with an alley because they are tagged and rendered the same would be a mapping disaster - which is exactly what OSM is doing with trails. 

Just because they may look a little similar (think of all the grades of roads) does not mean there is not a very large difference in assumed usage by the general population, especially those who would look to go into such areas. 

Javbw.