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

[Volker Schmidt]

On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 11:30, Daniel Westergren <westis at gmail.com> wrote:

> To confuse things more (or maybe less...), I just realized that iD is
> using highway=cycleway, bicycle=designated, foot=designated for a "Cycle
> and foot path". But in JOSM, the preset for the same is using
> highway=path...  Similarly, iD is using highway=footway as default for a
> sidewalk.
>

Daniel,

this difference in presets between JOSM and iD for foot-cycle-ways is well
known. And there are more than just these two variants, unfortunately..
I have been saying all the way that we have to live with these - it is much
too late to re-tag them.
What we are discussing now is how to make sure that a hiking path (not a
foot-cycle-way) is tagged correctly as such.
This is not helped by the fact that we do have hundreds of thousands of
ways that are tagged as highway=path and we are discussing how to indicate
that a path is a hiking trail. It has been proposed to introduce a new
value path=trail or path=hiking for that purpose.
As we do already have the sac_scale tagging for level of difficulty of
hiking paths and the lowest level of that is sac_scale=hiking. This would
correspond exactly, in my view, to the new proposed tag value(s) without
introducing a new tagging.
sac_scale=hiking is used 319 785 times - so I do not see a need to create a
new tagging meaning exactly the same thing.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20200527/1ad6c500/attachment-0001.htm>