[Tagging] How to tag recreational route with multiple route types?

[stevea]

All excellent dialog, all of it!  At first, I would have agreed with Peter's "use the 3rd option, where each transport mode [hike, bike, horse...] is a separate relation."  I've done that many times, and "it works" (makes sense, follows OSM's rules, is easily comprehensible, renders seemingly everywhere it should...).  Then, Sarah helpfully says that semicolon separated values in a network tag of a SINGLE relation ALSO works (for waymarkedtrails renderers, though likely not all renderers).

So, I'd say that both methods are OK.  Though I do lean towards multiple relations (and have, say around the Henry Cowell State Park area [1] of many different equestrian, hiking and bicycle trails that show up in Sarah's renderers), simply because I only just now learn that waymarkedtrails DOES respect semicolon-separated network values.

Minh's excellent exposition of how BART's Yellow Line is part heavy-rail subway, part light-rail (requiring a simple walk across a platform transfer where the rail gauge and transport technology changes) is highly informative, as it also shows how "good tagging by well-intentioned mappers" (like me!) works, even in the face of what is actually a complex sort of transport / rail semantics.

SteveA

[1] https://riding.waymarkedtrails.org/#?map=13!37.0297!-122.0589 , although choosing hiking or mountain biking shows the richness of the different networks in the area.  If you choose hiking, do know that the "local hiking" layer at the University of California campus intends to show on-campus wheelchair networks, a highly complex network on a very hilly campus that took a good year to properly develop in OSM, eventually to the satisfaction of the UCSC Transportation Department, where the intern who did the OSM data entry was working at the time.