[Talk-GB] UK Rights of Way - WikiProject

Andy Street mail at andystreet.me.uk
Thu May 3 19:11:01 BST 2012


On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 18:02 +0100, Andrew Chadwick wrote:
> > The thing I dislike about footway, bridleway, etc. is that they mix the
> > physical characteristics with access information. Using your definition
> > above I can think of a number of foottracks, bridletracks and even a
> > footunclassified.
> 
> Well, yes and no. If the signed public footpath across Farmer Giles's
> field has great big ruts along it from the pigswill tractor, I'd say
> _that's_ the primary defining use, not its signage as a footpath. Plus
> in my book it's probably too wide and vehicled-up to honestly call a
> h=path or a h=footway.

This hypothetical track follows the route of an ancient pathway and is
used more by the plethora of dog walkers from the nearby village than by
Farmer Giles. Surely by your logic this should be a foottrack?

> What I'm suggesting for new or intermediate users is having the
> documentation recommend roughly the same approach (designation and
> fine-grained highway), minus the plethora of access tags you have to use
> to represent E&W RoWs fully.

Sure, unless there is a TRO, or similar anomaly, then it is sensible not
to add access tags as all you're doing is duplicating what is already
implied by the designation tag.

> Keep the instructions really simple to
> attract new users, and don't confuse them with details about
> implications or full access values. h=footway and the other more
> specific kinds of h=path fit into this structure best; they're really
> simple, and make the information that new users can gather as useful as
> possible very minimally. h=path is somewhat useless unless it's used as
> a genuine "dunno" value like h=road, and we shouldn't be recommending it.

Why is path useless? What exactly does highway=footway,
designation=public_footpath tell you that highway=path,
designation=public_footpath doesn't?

If anything I'd say that highway=footway etc. are damaging as it
duplicates what we already record in the access/designation tags. It is
also confusing to new users that need to remember that at track and
above highway is the physical characteristics only whilst below it is
physical and access.

Cheers,

Andy




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