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

[Kevin Kenny]

I took the liberty of revising the English translation in
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sac_scale#Values to something
that I hope will be more helpful to English speakers. Some of the
phrases had obviously been machine-translated - the worst was most
likely 'single plainly climbing up to the second grade' which I
changed to 'Isolated easy climbing pitches up to UIAA grade 2'.

My German is not secure, and the original
(https://www.sac-cas.ch/fileadmin/Ausbildung_und_Wissen/Tourenplanung/Schwierigkeitsskala/Wanderskala-SAC.pdf)
is in Süddeutsch, verging on Schwyzertütsch, so please check me out on
it!

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 7:42 AM Daniel Westergren <westis at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Swedish we have basically "väg", which would translate to road or way, while "stig" would translate to footpath/path/trail,
"Väg" is cognate to the English "way" - go back to the Tenth Century,
and they're the same word. Old Norse 'stígr,' 'wanderer,' appears not
to have survived into English, although one word that we use for the
concept clearly has Norse roots: 'vagabond.' 'Path' is of
West-Germanic origin, and has cognates in German, Dutch, Frisian,
Luxembourgeois, and (!) Finnish, but apparently not the Scandinavian
languages. "Track" came to English from Old French, but is almost
certainly a Norse borrowing. It's related to English words such as
'tread' and 'trek', Norwegian 'trå', and Swedish 'träda'.

> Sorry for having caused a very long, but certainly very interesting and engaging thread on this never-ending topic. If it was discussed this way 12 (?) years ago, things would have been simpler. I understand the consensus as although it would have been good, it's probably too late for a separate highway tag for "trail" or whatever we call it and the only way forward is a subtag like "highway=trail"? Although what we need then is a clear definition of what it is and a way to handle all the cases when this subkey will not be used.

Let me reiterate that the subkey that's needed is actually the one
that asserts 'this IS what one would expect of an urban or suburban
footway', rather than 'this is a relatively unimproved "natural"
trail'. We already have many attributes that would indicate that a
trail might be relatively unimproved (`surface=ground`; `incline=*`;
`wheelchair=no`; `width=*`, `smoothness=*`, `sac_scale=*` and so on).
The fundamental problem is that it is not safe to draw any conclusion
from the absence of such a tag. A mapper may have tagged a wilderness
trail as `highway=path` or `highway=footway` and simply not added the
other attributes.

The best way to help the data consumer will be to have a tagging
scheme that allows asserting 'this IS an urban/suburban/front-country
footpath' as well as 'this is a relatively unimproved trail'.  It's
true at the start that providing such a thing will leave most
`highway=path` features ambiguous, but it at least would open a way
forward for disambiguating them. `path=trail` will NOT accomplish that
goal, because it still leaves two choices: 'this is a trail', and
'this is unknown/ambiguous'.
-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin