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

Kevin Kenny kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com
Sun May 24 19:14:00 UTC 2020


On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 12:53 PM Volker Schmidt <voschix at gmail.com> wrote:

> This proposal is not going to fly, unfortunately. As I said before the big issue, at least in central Europe, is the massiv use of highway=path (with the additional "designated" tags) for foot-cycleways. We will have to live with that. The non-foot-cycle "paths" can be handled by surface, smootness, and sac-scale tags.

The point is that you can't draw any inference from the absence of a
tag. We can't assume that because a mapper didn't tag sac_scale, that
a path is passable to small children or disabled people. We might have
to deal with the 'unknown' state for quite a while (and a router can
try to guess from some combination of the other tags), but eventually
we need to enable mappers to make the positive assertion that a path
_is_ accessible to people who aren't skilled hikers - at least to the
extent that urban footways usually are.

The absence of a tag `potrzebie=*` doesn't mean 'there's no potrzebie
here'; it means only `the mapper didn't say anything about potrzebie.'
Drawing the conclusion that 'there's no potrzebie' would require an
explicit `potrzebie=no` or some such.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin



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