I noticed that in the Khumbu region of Nepal (i.e where mount Everest is), a lot of trails that are sac_scale=hiking (or rarely sac_scale=mountain_hiking) are mapped as alpine_hiking and above, probably due to their altitude. It is true that for non-aclimatized person, an easy trail at 4000 or 5000 m of elevation feels hard and takes a long time to hike. Some routing applications use sac_scale to increase the estimated time it takes to cover it (good luck covering 4km of sac_scale=difficult_alpine_hiking in an hour :-D), so maybe that is the motivation here.
An example would be this: Way: 36871189 | OpenStreetMap
It looks like this (the wide path with stairs that is ahead and below me, not the path I am standing on in that picture, which is maybe sac_scale=mountain_hiking):
However, Key:sac_scale - OpenStreetMap Wiki never mentions altitude. Altitude is not part of OSM, but any application usable for hiking will use elevation data, so it can apply penalties based on that already. So I intend to dramatically decrease the difficulty of those trails (those that I covered). Any thoughts?
A wiki for sac_scale could probably use a mention that altitude on its own is not a consideration?
Did you get in touch via changeset comments with a few mappers who added sac_scale=* values to theses ways? Your example might not be the best example because that mapper stopped editing 13 years ago but your positing indicates that it is a widespread issue, isn’t it?
In June 2009 when sac_scale=* was added to the way (it was version 1), the wiki page did not mention altitude (same for the German version). I have not checked whether there was some wikifiddling in the meantime.
No, I have not contacted anybody. It seems alpine_hiking is a default since 2009 (at least) and people just use it because it is used elsewhere in the area, I think. I looked at maybe a dozen of trails and he situation is the same elsewhere. There are definitely no edit wars over this - I think somebody just started it that way and others copied.
I think there is a common misconception that if a path is in a mountainous (“alpine”) area, it should be at least sac_scale=alpine_hiking. I’ve seen such use in Greece and changed it to sac_scale=mountain_hiking without hesitation. Maybe the wiki should be clarified on this.
