[Tagging] Reviving the path discussion - the increasing importance of trails in OSM

[Daniel Westergren]

Expanding on the discussion about attributes for trails. What's the current
status of the highway=path mess? OSM is increasingly becoming more useful
for forest trails than for car roads (for which other sources are usually
more up-to-date, to be honest). But the default rendering doesn't
differentiate between a forest or mountain path and a paved, combined foot-
and cycleway in an urban environment.

Obviously we're not tagging for the renderer and the default OSM rendering
is discussed elsewhere. But has there been any fruitful discussing on this
topic that will help users to tag these clearly extremely different kinds
of "paths" in a way that make them more useful for data consumers, as well
as easier to differentiate for renderers?

Sure, tags like surface, width, trail_visibility can be used. But in most
cases, highway=path is used with no additional tag. The JOSM presets for
foot- and cycleways use foot|bicycle=designated, but that doesn't
necessarily tell anything about the surface or size of the path, or even
its importance in terms of usage by pedestrians, hikers and cyclists.

When highway=path was introduced, forest trails were not widely mapped and
not the main consideration when introducing the tag as a way to deal with
cases when footway or cycleway could not be used.

I realize this topic has been discussed extensively over the years. But
now more than ever OSM is becoming increasingly important for hikers, trail
runners and MTB cyclists for whom a forest or mountain path is something
completely different to an urban foot- or cycleway.

/Daniel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20200521/f8854a16/attachment.htm>