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

[Andrew Harvey]

On Wed, 27 May 2020 at 17:15, Daniel Westergren <westis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yeah, the main problem is that a path can be anything and everything can
> be a path.
>
> I mostly use JOSM and prefer presets to remember to tag all relevant
> attributes. That means that a combined foot- and cycleway becomes a path...
> In Sweden, 99% of all cycleways are open to pedestrians and there are few
> footways where bicycles are forbidden. Thus, almost everything becomes a
> path....
>
> I was even recommended by one of the most experienced Swedish mappers to
> use highway=footway for a natural forest path a couple of weeks ago...
> Which turns the mess the other way, that what really should be a path
> suddenly can be a footway and then we don't even know how to interpret
> footways... unless other tags, like surface etc. are used, which in a lot
> of cases they are not.
>
> For those combined urban foot- and cycleways, probably something like
> highway=footcycleway should have been introduced instead, to reserve path
> for the cases we're discussing here (which basically implies that it's not
> necessarily accessible to everyone, even if smoothness, sac_scale,
> mtb:scale etc. can be used to specify the difficulty/accessibility of the
> path).
>

The way I see it is there are two main views of highway=footway,path in
OSM.

1. Is that footway is urban and path is remote/forest
2. Is that footway is for primary walking paths (including remote/forest
paths) and that path is for non-specified usage or mixed use paths
(including urban paths).

These are conflicting and it does seem that OSM has a mix of both styles.
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