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

[Tod Fitch]

> On May 30, 2020, at 4:20 PM, Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefitz1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Something else that I've just thought about & not sure whether it would need to be mentioned - possibility of encountering dangerous wildlife?
> 
> Yes, there are 1000 things in the Australian bush that'll kill you :-), but none of them will actually eat you! (not even Drop Bears! https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/ <https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/> :-)) Same applies to (virtually?) all of Western Europe, but how about North America, Africa, Asia & so on? Do we have / need a way of tagging that bears (or whatever) may be encountered while walking in this area?
> 

Just about every trail head in my local area has warning signs about rattlesnakes and mountain lions [1]. One of the local county operated wilderness parks was closed this week because of mountain lion sightings.

But for the moment my goal is not tagging for dangerous wildlife but rather how can a mapper simply indicate that the way is a non-urban hiking (and possibly mountain biking and equestrian) trail.

I’ve spent too much time recently trying to figure out how to better determine whether the ways I am rendering should be shown as an urban/suburban walkway versus a non-urban hiking trail (intentionally not using “footway” and “path” as words for this). For straight rendering it doesn’t seem to be too big a deal if I get it slightly wrong, the map just looks uglier than I’d like.

But I am trying to display accurate mileage numbers on hiking trails and that means combining ways that are, for my purposes, functionally equivalent descriptions of a hiking trail: I really don’t want the distance between changes in width or surface or even bridges, so I need to “heal” those edges in my graph based on a simple hiking_trail=yes|no check. My Postgresql/PostGIS/osmfilter/osm2pgrouting skills aren’t great so I am probably missing something. But all the ways I’ve come with to munge the various surface/sac_scale/width/trail_visibility/width/etc. combinations into a simple “this is a hiking trail or not” are neither accurate nor fast to run on tagging I am finding in the field. There just has to be a better way to map these things!

Cheers!
Tod

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar

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