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

John Willis johnw at mac.com
Wed Jun 15 07:57:34 UTC 2016



> On Jun 15, 2016, at 2:48 PM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
> 
> physical attributes
> of ways

Then why do we have 7 different tags for roads, and then add attributes such as width, surface and so on? Why don't we differentiate all roads in your "we already have enough" way? 

Highway=road
Width=20m
Lanes=5
Smoothness=excellent

Oh! It's a motorway! 

Nope! Toll entrance to Tokyo Disneyland... 

We could just have a highway=motorway. 

Highway=path
Surface=stone
Width=1m
Smoothness=horrible (or whatever value that tag uses). 

Is that a 400 year old stone path through a Japanese temple? Is that a rough path along a stream along a stone face? Is that a dangerous route over a pile of boulders? Who can tell?  Certainly not a data provider.

How is a data provider supposed to make assumptions of what a particular path is when there is no place to start from? All of the motorway-to-service values give a good general starting point to guess from. Path is a big mushy pile of mixed opinions that leads to inaccurate assumptions - which leads to inaccurate mapping, rendering, and eventually disappointed users. 

All of the tagging issues I encounter stem from the abundance of detailed tags in one area of OSM being used to justify the lack of need for the _exact_same_level_of_detail_ requested by mappers in different areas. Bikers, hikers,Trekkers, and park visitors are not going to benefit from the 7 qualitative tags (plus 5 track grades) when there is only 3 available to non-vehicle traffic - 3 to cover a giant manicured national mall-arcade space down to the most difficult and rough-hewn trail through boulders. 

Highway=pedestrian
Highway=path
Highway=footway (now same as path><) 

Where is the "track" for path?
Where is the "track grades" to go with it? 


The lack of it is bewildering. 

Javbw. 




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