[Talk-GB] Advice please: Goat tracks in mountain areas

[Phil Endecott]

Hi Everyone,

Gruff Owen wrote:
> I'm specifically interested in the following Way, which was added to OSM
> around 5 months ago: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/982094029
>
> It has been tagged as:
> bicycle:no
> highway:path
> horse:no
>
> In my judgement / experience, I would say that this Way is best described
> as a "Goat track".

As some of you may recall I'm responsible for a mobile app which
displays OSM paths over an OS OpenData base map. It will pick up
this path when I next update the maps in a few months, unless
something changes.

I think it's worth noting that both OSM and OS show the grade 1
scramble along Crib Goch and Crib y Ddysgl as a path, and OSM
also shows the North ridge of Crib Goch as a path. Is the path
in question a more serious route than those? (Does it get more
rescue callouts than Crib Goch?)

Let's say I were to not render paths with sac_scale of
demanding_mountain_hiking or worse, so that this path would
disappear. That would also remove the Crib Goch scramble and
very many other important mountain routes. This would not improve
mountain safety.

Omitting a feature also means that someone who knows that they
have to e.g. "take the second path on the left" may go wrong.
I once met a couple on Great Gable who had hiked from Langdale
and thought they were on Scafell Pike, because of an error of
this sort.

Rendering is difficult. I have literally never had any complaints
from users saying that I show too many paths. On the other hand,
I get frequent complaints about missing paths. So my inclination
is to render everything that could possibly be a path. The next
question is whether rendering style can be used to distinguish
between "good" and "bad" paths. My aim has been to approximate
what OS do on their paper maps, where styles are used primarily
to identify the legal status of a path (i.e. footpath, bridleway,
permissive paths, or non-right-of-ways) and indeed to indicate
whether a line is a path at all, rather than a boundary, wall,
power line etc. There's only a finite number of visually distinct
styles and a smaller number that users will actually remember.
We all know stories of people following parish boundaries up
mountains, until so many people have done it that there actually
is a path there.

Ultimately the best mountain maps require some level of curation,
taking local factors into account - but not too much of it, to
provide uniformity. There's no way that mobile apps or map
providers like Strava, MapBox, or me can offer that.


Regards, Phil.