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

Kevin Kenny kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com
Mon Jan 27 20:49:18 UTC 2020


On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 3:16 PM Mike Thompson <miketho16 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is an example of a major trail in the area where I live: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/385367054 which someone has tagged as a cycleway.  I have biked, walked and ran this trail many different times over the years and I have no indication that it was built for a specific purpose.  On a typical day I would say that non cyclists outnumber cyclist. I also just visited the websites for the various entities that manage the trail, and there is no indication I could find that it was built for a single purpose.  It is a general recreation trail.  I suspect the "cycleway" tag was used so that it would show up in some cycling specific renderer... but I can't say that for sure.

I wound up creating both 'bicycle' and 'hiking' route relations for
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/306742 (cycle)
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5166476 (foot). It looks as if
most of the constituent ways are tagged `highway=path foot=designated
bicycle=designated`.  It's definitely multi-purpose as the
'Mohawk-Hudson Bike-Hike Trail' name suggests. (I'm very familiar with
it, since a short bit of it is part of my daily commute.)

Waymarked Trails finds the foot and cycling routes, and OpenCycleMap
finds the cycling route, so at least some data consumers were able to
figure this one out, despite not having ways tagged specifically
'footway' or 'cycleway'.

If someone wants to distinguish a dirt singletrack from a paved
cycleway, I'd suggest `surface=*` and `width=*`.

I don't understand the urban-rural discussion at all.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin



More information about the Tagging mailing list