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

Volker Schmidt voschix at gmail.com
Sat Apr 4 14:20:33 UTC 2020


> The key issue with that approach: how does a mapper who isn't expert
> enough to grade accurately the difficulty of a MTB trail, but can
> clearly see, 'a road bike wouldn't work here', tag the thing
> appropriately?  Simple 'highway=path foot=yes bicycle=yes' invites
> routing disasters. I can, and do, add 'surface=ground
> smoothness=horrible', but is that enough? How many tags must a router
> take into consideration before deciding that a cycleway is actually
> usable?
>

This is not the correct tagging anyway for a (countryside or mountain)
path, at least for those countries where the default access for
highway=path implies bicycle=yes and horse=yes (legal access!).
And: the router should ignore the bicycle=yes tag on a highway=path.
highway=path on its own does not imply any indication about the suitability
for using it on foot, on bicycle, or on horse.
The suitability can be indicated by a variety of tags:
surface; smoothness; sac:scale; mtb:scale; incline; width; trail_visibility
(leaving aside the special cases of bicycle|foot=designated|official which
are, unfortunately, an established way of tagging mixed foot-cycle paths in
general)
The mapper should insert those tags that she can assess on the ground or
from other available sources.
It is these tags that a trekking bicycle router should assess:
it should put a severe penalty on highpath=path without any additional
tagging, or with bad surface, or with steep incline, or with mtb:scale>0,
or with poor trail_visibility.
it should assign a very low penalty to a highway=path with
bicycle=designated, or to highway=cycleway
(most likely my tag examples are not complete, but this illustrates the
concept)
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