[Tagging] Can highway=cycleway be limited to MTB?

[Jmapb]

On 4/2/2020 9:29 AM, Paul Johnson wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 3:10 AM Andrew Harvey <andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com
> <mailto:andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     My view based on current usage, reading of the wiki and general
>     opinion is that highway=cycleway is meant for any path that is
>     either designed/intended for bicycles or specifically designated
>     (signposted) for bicycles, irrespective of if it's an urban track
>     or mountain biking track.
>
>     So a mountain bike track and an urban cycle track should both be
>     tagged with highway=cycleway as the primary tag. surface= and
>     smoothness= can help for both to help guide users on which kind of
>     bicycle the track is suitable for, and mtb:scale=/mtb:scale:imba=
>     are used to indicate this is a designated mountain biking track.
>
>     highway=path is specifically for a general use / unspecified path,
>     which a mountain biking track may be if it's informal/shared, but
>     purpose built and signposted mountain bike tracks don't fall into
>     that category.
>
>     A similar thing applies to hiking tracks, sometimes they are
>     designated walking paths so use highway=footway + surface +
>     sac_scale, but sometimes they are just an unmarked or mixed use
>     path so are highway=path + surface + sac_scale.
>
>
> This is also my read on it.  But we also need more than just
> highway=path/cycleway and sometimes footway for bicycle facilities,
> there's a bigger hierarchy than this.  Also seen a lot of situations
> where highway=cycleway_link would be handy.
>
Perhaps highway=mtbway, which would be to cycleway what track is to
residential. It's ugly but it seems that a lot of people feel that
highway=path is not an ideal tag for a purpose-built mountain bike
trail. If highway=cycleway + mtb:scale above 1 is considered troll
tagging, then maybe mtbway is worth considering.

Btw, since the original example Phyks posted is one of mine, I can
describe exactly how the tagging happened:

  - Noticing local mtb trails tagged as hw=cycleway (can't remember
which ones exactly).
  - Reading the cycleway wiki page and seeing no counterindications to
this tagging, concluding that a mountain bike is a bicycle and that
trails primarily designed for mountain bikes should be cycleways.
  - Visiting this park and seeing from the park map and personal
observation that some trails were primarily designed for mountain bikes.
  - Reading the park map where trails are described as "easier", "more
difficult", and "most difficult" which I mapped to mtb:scale 0, 1, and 2
-- with a clear changeset comment that these values are guesses and
should be revised by knowledgeable people. (I'm not a mountain biker
myself; I walked these trails.)

Is mtb:scale=2 correct for this trail? Maybe not. Maybe I should have
mapped them to 0, 0+, and 1. Maybe they're all 0. But these ratings are
kind of subjective. Could a general purpose bicycle handle this trail?
I'm sorry to say that I can't remember. I'll survey again when I can,
but someone experienced with mountain biking could probably do better.

Jason

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