[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - highway=scramble

[Sarah Hoffmann]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 08:16:08AM -0700, Tod Fitch wrote:
> Interpreting OSM tags to decide if a way is a hiking trail is a hot mess. In my hiking map rendering I look at over a dozen tags, individually and in combination, to decide if a way is a hiking trail or not. Obviously this is not ideal and we should consider a better way of dealing with this.
> 
> Even though I think improvements in hiking trail tagging are good to be considered, this highway=scramble strikes me as being a first cut at best and its entire purpose is to remove some specific items from the  rendering as displayed at https://www.openstreetmap.org/ In other words, its intent is “tagging for the renderer” which is against the general philosophy of tagging in OSM.

This is the wrong way around. The root problem is that we have a lot
of OSM ways tagged highway=path just for the simple reason that they
get rendered on the main map. Moving some of the "paths" that really
stretch the limits of the definition out of the highway=path tag space
will correct this mistake and lead to less tagging for the renderer.

To get this mess sorted out we should probably start with the discussion
'what is a hishway=path'. The current definition in the wiki is
not helpful in any way. It basically says that anything can be a path,
i.e. a way with only highway=path carries no information at all.

Sarah