[Tagging] Proposed rewrite Of highway=track wiki page

[Bert -Araali- Van Opstal]

I confirm what you are trying to explain Kevin. It's exactly how I see 
it too.
If I may refer back to the way of thinking I tried to explain before is 
that the way of distinguishing a path from the basic thought that every 
road is a track, is that it is created spontaniously or purposely to 
seperate slower traffic (whatever that may be, animals, humans, vehicles).
A path can be very wide, or very narrow. A "track" can have one or 
multiple tracks, can be narrow or wide. Both can be paved or unpaved, 
separation is the key factor to distinguish one from the other.
Your examples clearly support that logic.
Other examples:

-many tracks develop spontaneously besides a road.  Pedestrians start 
creating a path because they feel unsafe walking on the road which 
carries fast moving vehicles. Spontaneous separation. We call it a path 
because it spontaneously developed out of the need to separate slower 
moving traffic.

- an authority decides to make a separate cycleway along a road, again 
to separate the slower traffic from the faster one. It becomes a path, 
based on separation. Later, cycling becomes very popular along this 
path, so the municipality decides to make it wider, so the cyclists can 
easily pass each other (multiple tracks form next to each other). It 
remains a path because it serves the same separation. Later the 
municipality decides to pave it, to increase the comfort of the 
cyclists.  It still remains a path, based on separation slow from faster.

Tracks are the remainder of this elimination process by separation:
1. Motorway / Express-way -> fastest

2. road (based on socio economic classification) or track = medium speed 
or mixed fastest / fast and slower

3. path -> slower separate.

Greetings,

Bert Araali

On 09/03/2021 03:52, Kevin Kenny wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 8, 2021 at 9:02 AM Martin Koppenhoefer 
> <dieterdreist at gmail.com <mailto:dieterdreist at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Am Mo., 8. März 2021 um 14:11 Uhr schrieb Zeke Farwell
>     <ezekielf at gmail.com <mailto:ezekielf at gmail.com>>:
>
>         The reason I am working on this is that it is often unclear to
>         me where the boundaries are between 'path' and 'track' on the
>         low end
>
>
>
>     this at least should be very easy: it's the width. A way that is
>     physically accessible to 2 tracked vehicles is at least a track,
>     while narrower ones are paths.
>
>
> I thought you were one of the ones that was arguing that a track must 
> be exclusively for agriculture or forestry? Did I misremember?
>
> I know a number of shared-use foot/bridleway or foot/cycleway that are 
> wide enough to take a double-tracked vehicle, and I occasionally see 
> double-tracked maintenance vehicles on them (for instance, to plow 
> snow, regrade a bridleway, or re-lay the asphalt on a cycleway). I 
> don't think that makes them tracks.  Locally, `highway=path 
> foot=designated bicycle=designated` or `highway=path foot=designated 
> horse=designated` are common tag clusters.
>
>
> -- 
> 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
>
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