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

[Ture Pålsson]

26 maj 2020 kl. 11:33 skrev Volker Schmidt <voschix at gmail.com>:
> 
> We have now been reviving the path discussion in 73 messages, and counting ...
> I still feel we are not understanding each other (or is it only me who is lost?)
> To me a highway=path is a concept that is well defined in the wiki, and the various types can be described with existing tags.

The text and image at the top of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpath <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=path> seems to indicate that highway=path is mainly intended for more or less unprepared paths. Yet, the examples at the bottom of the page show how to tag paved, signed, urban foot- and cycleways.

And I am fairy sure I have seen people advocate that highway=footway and =cycleway should be deprecated and replaced with =path plus various extra tags.

Personally, I would love to see highway=path in the woods and =cycleway/footway for the purpose-built stuff, but existing tagging seems to disagree. Only a few days ago, someone changed a >2-metre-wide, paved, signed [1], lit (I may be wrong about that), cycleway near where I live from highway=cycleway to highway=path.

So the problem is not that we can’t describe things, but that there are too many ways to describe them. The reason that I have the complicated rule set I described earlier for rendering highway=path is not that I think it’s fun, but that it’s necessary to make sense of the data.

Admittedly, adding yet another tag to the soup might not be the right solution to that problem...

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:120px-Zeichen_240.svg.png
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