Today I went to fact check some edits that created a controversy in my local area that even caused the DWG to step in. I outfitted my mobile app with a set of concerned PoIs and explored the area from OSM Standard View and on my mobile app, which adds blunt sac_scale grading and SRTM terrain model, but is not daily updated. As I wanted to do that check for a while, I also had found time for a look at the area when passing by the other side of the valley; due diligence for my personal well-being.
Accompanied by a friend knowledgeable to the area, today, a Sunday, we started off. I found there a mostly grassy path, in some places as wide as the palm of a hand, where a slip would send me down upwards of a 100 m of height a very steep cliff before my body would come to a rest. There was some dew still, but we managed fine. All in all a pleasant trip, and openstreetmap contributed a tiny bit. The most amazing PoI was not mapped yet, will be done in near time. The PoIs proved worth the adventure.
Returning home, I found that in OSM there is a path mapped without any attributes, that connects some of the PoIs. This was added with the PoIs that caused the conflict, but my mobile app does not have it yet.
Why do I tell the story: Please consumers of highway=path, do not show paths with no attributes as a line with a casing or as being two metres wide paved, please do not route over such as if they were a Sunday Stroll.
People use the (IMO slightly troublesome practice) of Duck Tagginghighway=cycleways (often, as the only tag) to indicate ways (otherwise mostly tagged as =paths, I suppose) that are particularly suitable for bicycles. The implicit idea is that a way tagged with =cyclewaymust be wide and smooth enough for a normal bicycle to handle.
In my mind it directly follows from that very assumption that a way with only a highway=path tag must represent the absolute pariah class of ways. This is because—unlike with e.g. cycleway and footway—very little if anything can be truth preservingly inferred from the path tag alone. Hence the only reasonable assumption is that it must be a very narrow and non-paved, barely visible path suitable for passage only if one is wearing hiking boots.
A path essentially allows legal access to all sorts of traffic that only need a narrow way. Without attributes exactly nothing more than this can be derived from the class.
This is because we have a similar pariah class for motorized traffic in highway=track. So yeah, one can truth-preservingly infer that you can’t drive any four-wheeled vehicle (and probably not most two-wheeled bikes either) on a highway=path
Not quite. Since the introduction of, first, the e-bike and recently the fat-bike, thicker wheels are common and moany paths can be used by more bikes.
Hence the word “most” in my original comment. Most bikes are not fat-bikes nor e-bikes. More to the point and thread at hand, this only exacerbates the idea that ways tagged with onlyhighway=path are in the pariah-class. One needsspecialized gear (hiking boots or fat-bikes) to traverse them.
I can’t think of a single trail around here (Colorado USA) and there are some rough trails here, where boots are required. Nor can I think of one where you need a fat bike (vs. a regular rull suspension mountain bike). Fat bikes are good for certain conditions, e.g. snow covered trails. In any event, I wouldn’t consider either of these things “specialized gear.”
Under the rationale of iterative refinement, it is fine to just map a path there with no attributes and leave it up to others to do that boring grunt work: bicycle, horse, mofa, sac_scale, surface, width &c?
Should I do that? If so, why? After all, no specialized gear necessary. A Swiss club for researching historic mining termed the prerequisites for visiting the PoIs:
Exclusively for persons with absolute head for heights and sure-footedness. Very steep and exposed terrain. Cannot call that gear
Yes, but we should encourage people to add as much information as is available from reliable sources that have a license compatible with OSM. Of course, the best course of action is to travel on the path yourself and take lots of pictures, videos, and notes. However, not everyone is willing to do that, and that is ok.
In the US we would call that “exposure”, that feeling you get in your gut that when you look over a ledge to a surface far below, whether or not there is a danger of falling. I don’t think we have a tag for that in OSM.
If one is planning a hike, scramble, ride, or climb, and the sources you have do not provide adequate information (e.g. a OSM highway=path with no other tags) you should seek out additional sources until you are confident that your intended route matches your skills, fitness, equipment, and desired level of adventure. Very few maps in my experience provide this. This may be due to the fact that it is difficult to convey all of this information with a limited set of symbology. I find it usually necessary to consult a guide book (often nowadays that is an online guidebook).
The sac_scale tag does capture exposure, or rather, it is one of the things it captures.
Of course, not all OSM-based maps show it. Those that do usually show harder paths in a different style than easier paths (e.g. dashed line instead of continuous line), but show a path without sac_scale the same as one with sac_scale=hiking, so the path without the tag appears very easy…
This is a problem, especially in areas where some paths have sac_scale and others don’t. In my experience, it’s often the more difficult paths that don’t have the tag, and the easier paths that are more often walked that have the tag, so the easier paths appear harder on the map than the hard paths.
It’s not easy to tell from most hiking maps if the path has sac_scale=hiking or if it has no sac_scale tag and might therefore be difficult_alpine_hiking, for all we know. (Luckily Tracestrack Topo shows it. Before, you would have had to go to OSM.org, right click and “Query features”…)
As a mapper, I know this, but I would guess that a lot of users of hiking apps don’t. They just learn from experience that their app (and OSM, if they know what OSM is) isn’t to be trusted.
The PoIs are very appealing to special interest groups, mineral seekers and (pre)historic mining site researchers. The quote above in the picture from the excursion description of the Swiss club is the only reference I found to the path on the WWW. The aerial shows only woods, the terrain model looks innocuous. The mineral seekers website shows geolocated pins on a map view based on openstreetmap-de. On this and the OSM Standard View the path indeed in no way discernible from a sunday stroll. A path in the woods. The PoIs appear on the mineral seekers site a lot more accessible by this addition.
Here the start of the path twenty minutes from bus stop and where Strava Heat ends:
Here the part I mentioned above, the path itself not in view, but what looks like a path and in view, looks just like the path itself, another ten minutes of walk, if not in for the PoIs along the way:
My gut feeling tells me, this merits trail_visibility=bad and sac_scale=alpine hiking, the latter, because of exposure, the parking lot is 165 meters of altitude below, average incline ~50°.
Of course I will fill the extra tags, so specialized apps can show the gory details. Is there a way to make general purpose maps reflect them?
But there are hiking apps that show it clearly and the awareness of its importance is getting better and better. I think a good idea is to fill out bug issues or send mails to app and map developers about this, or maybe some developers are even reading this
I think because sac_scale is so important, also the iD editor should show the sac_scale input field as default at the top, so people are encouraged to set it as often as possible.
This is very nice indeed. I use such an app and built it from source to tweak it even further for my needs. I got by without app before, but it is nice to have. I got by last Sunday’s stroll also without a path on the screen. I had the PoIs loaded from GPX. The coolest one was missing. It alone was worth the trip Interested people invited to browse the area on gk.historic.place.
I did that the last few months. Response has always been very kind and forthcoming. The result can be directly observed when asking for guidance in the OSM main page. Who to take care of the many dozens of other consumers of OSM data?
And Now for Something Completely Different, one more photo form last Sunday stroll:
Interested people invited to browse the area on gk.historic.place.