[Tagging] highway=path for *all* mixed foot/bicycle highways?

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 12:00 PM Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
>  Not exactly helping is that the US tends to also confuse form and access, calling things "multipurpose paths" even when they are clearly purpose built for a specific mode and possibly even do have specific mode restrictions.

True enough.  Still, there are a lot of rail-trails and the like where
foot, bicycle, and XC ski travel were all contemplated from the moment
that the trail was paved. There are also a bunch of recreational
trails near me that I'd be hard put to identify whether foot or MTB is
the 'primary' use.  And farther out in the sticks, there are a bunch
of old carriage roads that were redesignated footways and have
subsequently been opened to MTB travel as well. (Some of these are
grown to trees to the point where I don't feel comfortable labeling
them with `highway=track`.)

Martin Koppenhoefer:
> this seems very strange and is likely the result of fiddling. In the areas I am aware of, path is the standard way to map mixed mode ways regardless of context (urban or not).

I did that with combined foot/MTB trails near me, and consistently
other mappers retagged them as `highway=footway bicycle=designated`
for the unpaved ones and `highway=cycleway foot=designated` for the
paved ones.  When I saw that this was happening consistently, I
decided to avoid `path`.  (This was quite a long time ago. It may have
been NE2's bot that did the retagging.)
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin