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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 21.05.20 10:33, Ture Pålsson via Tagging wrote:
> What I suppose that I wish to say with all this is that in practice, I
> have seen highway=path used to mean anything from something that is not
> even visible on the ground,

An interesting side thread to this is not about the visibility but about
the accessibility - at DWG we've recently received a plea from a member
of a volunteer mountain rescue team to remove the highway=path attribute
from a dangerous approach to a mountain that was only suitable for
experienced mountaineers with appropriate gear. The way *did* have a
"sac_scale" to indicate difficult alpine hiking but apparently that was
not good enough, or too many clients were just ignoring that (in a post
on talk-gb recently, Andy Allan wrote: "I've seen maps from a
multi-billion-dollar-revenue organisation that were rendering anything
with a highway tag the same as their most minor road style"). It is not
proven that the many people having required rescue services on that path
came there because of OSM - could be any other source too - but this is
one aspect of the general "path" problem.

If we map "highway=path" + "danger=you will be shot" and then someone
gets shot because their Android app only looked at highway=path, can we
*really* sit back and say "their fault, we don't map for the Android app"?

Sorry if this is somewhere on the Wiki, I love the Wiki for
documentation but I hate Wiki discussions with all my heart and cannot
bring myself to read them, much less participate in them.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"