That would mean highway=path without other tags is not routed at all. Is that a realistic approach?
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I donât own a elephant, so I don know! 
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For any mode other than on foot, absolutely. If the mapping in a particular country is so poor than most highway=path donât have other tags, then a sensible approach would be to penalise âunknown qualityâ routes as if they were a muddy, boggy, path (which of course itâs entirely possible that they might be).
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In my opinion, yes. To me it feels like highway=path on its own is nearly on the same level as highway=road in terms of what data consumers can glean from it. i.e. very little.
Here is an overpass query attempting to identify instances of highway=path without any more specific descriptive tags. Iâve not been able to run it worldwide without the request timing out, but in every area Iâve run it, there are many results. They represent all sorts of different path types as well as things that arenât paths at all. Donât trust this tag.
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On the contrary, in my country and a good part of the world highway=path is pretty well-defined as a countryside trail, with implied surface=ground and access foot=yes; vehicle=no; bicycle=perhaps_but_bad_idea. Iâm willing to bet a considerable amount of money that over 95% of highway=paths in the Balkans are like in the leading photo of the Wiki page:
(And Iâve just edited a path in the Dolomites where I hiked today). I really donât know the history of the tag, but in many places it just emerged spontaneously to denote a âhiking trailâ or something resembling it. I was surprised when I found out usages in Germany and the Netherlands describing a paved, urban, combined foot & cycleway. In my view, that was an abuse of a tag intended for something else.
(I donât have a very strong opinion about whether path should be used for SAC-scale alpine trails â but thatâs another topic).
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I share this point of view. If highway=path were universally used in alignment with your definition Iâd be much happier. That is how Iâve always used the tag. Unfortunately, there are many uses that donât align with this narrower definition. The seeds of this are right in the original proposal which aimed to potentially replace highway=footway, highway=cycleway, and highway=bridleway. This didnât happen but the idea that highway=path can be for anything called a path took hold anyway.
A counterpart of yours in Austria tagged a UIAA VII climbing route as a path and fights viciously for it to remain a path and get rendered by any and all consumers so it gets the variety it deserves.
Needless to say, there are also other mappers that insist that highway=cycleway is feature of the past and the canonical mapping is highway=path+bicycle=designated.
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A big reason why that approach was bound to fail and leaves us with the mess we currently have (even though it does make sense in a way) is that we do not really have any tagging schemes that describe the practicality of using a path with a bicycle, etcâŚ
The access tagging scheme is only concerned with legal matters (which is a good thing, donât dilute it by mixing other things into it).
Tags that describe the physical properties such as surface, smoothness, width ⌠can help to make a judgement whether a path is suitable to ride a bike on, but they are very time consuming and difficult to tag. Picking the right values can be hard even when you are right there, standing directly on the path you are trying to describe. Doing it accurately using only aerial images, even after having actually walked a path is bordering on impossible.
If I see a mountain hiking path on the map or on aerial imagery, I know that using it with a bicycle (not talking about MTBs) is completely impractical, but I have no way to actually add that information.
An approach like that would probably have worked for ânormalâ roads for cars. (Car-)Roads have far less variability than paths for pedestrians/cyclists/horseback riders/hikers.
The difference between highway classifications (highway=primary/secondary/tertiary/âŚ) is often not really distinguishable on the ground and doesnât change the main conclusion that can be drawn from the tag: âcar goes brrrâ.
The importance/classification of a road could just as well be added as as sub-tag without massively changing its meaning.
Looks like defining âwhat a path isâ is not a viable option.
I think that a lot of issues would be solved by agreeing on
a. Acceptance of the range of real-world features tagged as highway=path (and describing this as fact-of-life);
b. Establishing a set of tags that adequately describe specific cases or country-specific rules
c. Establishing a world-wide set of implicit and default tags;
This would be the anchor for mapping, validation, QA, rendering and routing, regardless of which tags are chosen. It would be a compromise, so everybody will be unhappy about some aspects, but also everybody should be happy about other aspects.
I think a. and b. are not that problematic. Current practice is well underway.
c. is a subset of b.
Establishing this would require mappers and mapper (sub)communities to look beyond âwhat is a path in my neighbourhood/region/countryâ to âwhat is a viable world wide defaultâ.
Example, not for path but for cycleway: in Nederland a cycleway along a road is by default oneway, but the world wide default is two-way cycle traffic. So we explicitly tag oneway=yes on all oneway cycleways along roads, AND oneway=no on all two-way cycleways along roads. Thatâs a bore, but we mostly use presets for this, and that is the thing to do once world wide tags and defaults have been established.
I was so obnoxious to tag the âpathâ where @Superfebs got lost a highway=route, because the mapper said, there is nothing on the ground and they made it a âgrey wayâ not a âred oneâ, as if openstreetmap was a paint-book. Not a day after it got retagged a highway=path and will again be rendered red in Tracestack Topo. See Way History: âŞSentiero 30⏠(âŞ1307520308âŹ) | OpenStreetMap and Changeset: 155205011 | OpenStreetMap for discussion.
Mind you, @Superfebs managed to go down a pathless UIAA III route without taking harm. How many of the participants in this topic can claim doing that?
So, yes, highway=path can mean most anything, even immaterial stuff, and that is a fact, as put forward by CAI Salò by reinstating a path where there is none.
Curiously, efforts to tell consumers of this data about that get ridiculed Consuming highway=path, Episode 2 - #3 by Peter_Elderson â All the while consumers are expected to honour these elite tags and for ages they fail to do that. Who is more stubborn, the community or the consumers?
That was not the intetion, sorry if I gave the wrong impression.
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