In Colombia, we discussed highways mapped as bridleways, which in our context is defined as:
Ways used mainly for transporting all types of goods on roads that are not paved or in slope to mule back, without ruling out the use of other light vehicles such as motorcycles. They are of common use in Colombian geography. Colombia - Guide for mapping
In our context, a bridleway is allowed for horses and pedestrians; however, they are not considered in all routers.
These are the different routes in different engines:
I would add foot=yes to these bridleways to specify that pedestrians are allowed. Routers should then direct users on these ways (or if not the router should be changed). This wiki page attempts to document default access assumptions routers could make about different way types. As you can see, rules vary by country. In reality they probably vary a lot within countries. Better to use explicit access tags to record the allowed transport modes.
Do the above mentioned routers really take into account the country-specific defaults from the above mentioned wiki page? Do they behave differently in different countries?
I think this is good advice. In England and Wales where bridleways are very much part of the rural landscape we have had problems with a variety of routers either ignoring them altogether or not respecting sensible rules for transport modes. Although, in an ideal world, the router providers would repair this defect, adding additional access modes is a much faster way of resolving routing problems. Mainly, this is just making implicit access rules explicit.
I’d be very surprised. To any reasonable approximation, no-one reads the wiki. At the very least the UK section is utter rubbish, because those rules aren’t consistent across the UK.
Excluding “roll your own” solutions like mkgmap, I can think of one router that does, but it’s not really applicable here.
