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

[Andrew Harvey]

It seems like most people are saying highway=cycleway should only be used
for urban road bicycle paths, not for mountain bike tracks, sparing one or
two vocal critics like myself.

If that's the overwhelming opinion I can live with it, but we need to

1. update the wiki to make this clearer (which I'm happy to help out with,
but need a decision here first to backup the changes) and,
2. work out how a dedicated mountain bike track should be tagged if not
highway=cycleway

It feels like there are two camps on what highway=path is, some (and the
wiki) says it's for unspecified designated modes or mixed used paths,
others say it's for any remote path that's in the woods. Given the wiki
says it's the former, then dedicated mountain bike tracks aren't
highway=path since they are specifically designed, signposted or designated
for mountain bikes. So the only suggestion I've seen so far for a
non-shared dedicated mountain bike track is leisure=track. Although I would
have thought leisure=track made more sense for a BMX pump track, I guess
these tracks that are purpose built are done for mostly leisure as opposed
as ways to help you get from A to B.

So if we use leisure=track, then what does sport=cycling mean, is that just
for track cycling like in a veledrome, or does it also include mountain
bikes and BMX bikes?

On Fri, 3 Apr 2020 at 02:54, Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

> Snusmumriken <snusmumriken.mapper at runbox.com> writes:
>
> > On Thu, 2020-04-02 at 22:24 +1100, Andrew Harvey wrote:
> >> just usually only a certain kind of bicycle.
> >
> > Well, that's the problem, if one can't travel on a certain way with a
> > general purpose bicycle, then it shouldn't be tagged highway=cycleway
>
> I agree, and I think this is the point.
>
> We don't use "highway=unclassified" for a road that cannot be used by a
> passenger car and is only passable with an extreme-high-clearance 4WD
> vehicle.
>

But we do, as I've mentioned
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway#Assumptions says that
classification is independent of what kind of vehicle you need, so you
could be any of the highway=* tags except motorway for high clearance 4WD
vehicles if they meet the highway classification definition. It is my
understanding this is standard practice in many parts of the world.

On Fri, 3 Apr 2020 at 03:42, Jmapb <jmapb at gmx.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
I was thinking of something like that, but I think that ship has sailed.
Until such time as OSM has a process to make breaking changes like this
without breaking things for data consumers, I can't see a mass retagging in
this way happen as overnight it would break things for many people who rely
on this data.

> 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.
>
That's exactly the conclusion I've come too, and why this whole thread
exists since the wiki is not clear on this.
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