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

[Joseph Eisenberg]

> The fact that they thought it was a good idea to munge path and footway
together is partially what got us into this mess

My understanding is that mappers were already using highway=footway and
highway=path in overlapping ways.

In Indonesia, there does not seem to be any consistency about whether the
unpaved foot path in the mountains, between remote villages, should be
tagged highway=footway or highway=path, for example. They are certainly not
designed for bicycles or horses (most of the bridges are only one narrow
log wide and there are many stiles and ladders to cross), but there is no
legal access prohibitions.

While most of this discussion has been considering recreational trails in
Western countries, it is important to remember than most unpaved footways,
paths and trails in the world are located in other countries. Remote areas
in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania have extensive networks of
unpaved paths between remote villages in deserts, mountains and tropical
forests where there are no roads for 2-track motor vehicles.

– Joseph Eisenberg

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 12:12 PM Sarah Hoffmann <lonvia at denofr.de> wrote:

> On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 03:03:40PM -0400, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> > On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 5:42 AM Sarah Hoffmann <lonvia at denofr.de> wrote:
> > > The SAC scale grades 1-3 are quite helpful. It's just the blue scales
> 4-6
> > > which are not really applicable in OSM because very few routes of that
> > > scale would fall under the highway=path classification (even under the
> > > catch-all definition of OSM).
> >
> > The first problem with the sac_scale is that it's not got anything at
> > the low end. For trails in urban and suburban areas, we want to know,
> > for instance, whether the trail might be accessible to the disabled or
> > to small children. That's actually the single biggest problem here.
>
> sac_scale is useful for what it was made for, namely hiking trails.
> It was never meant to be used on urban paths. In fact, the presence
> of the tag tells you that the path in question is not an urban path.
> Complaining that it has no values for urban accessibility is like
> complaining
> that all the values for the waterway key are unsuitable for highways.
>
> > Without delving into a ton of auxiliary information, there's no
> > difference between an urban footway and a wilderness trail!  For that
> > reason, 'surface' and 'smoothness' and 'incline' and 'sac_scale' are
> > all trolltags: they destroy fundamental expectations (at least to
> > urbanites) of what a 'path' is. (Those false expectations are
> > responsible for many outdoor accidents in my part of the world - I'm
> > close enough to several large cities that we get many unprepared
> > tourists.)
>
> I highly doubt that somebody who doesn't think twice about using a
> path in the mountains/outback without experience and gear will be deterred
> by a suitability tag. The real problem with those people is the lack
> of thinking not the lack of tagging.
>
> That said, my favourite solution here would indeed be to add a new main
> tag highway=trail and slowly retag the existing mountain paths starting
> with the most dangerous/abused ones. They would disappear from the map for
> a while until renderers and apps have adapted to the new schema.
> I'd consider this actually a plus because only the data users that
> are really interested in outdoors would adapt while for everybody else the
> trails are just gone. And for the ones who do want to use them, we'd
> send a very strong message: this is a different kind of highway,
> you cannot just handle it like every other path. (I hope even the
> Carto people finally get the message. The fact that they thought it
> was a good idea to munge path and footway together is partially what
> got us into this mess.)
>
> Sarah
>
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