As so often happens, the way different people describe these issues is shaped by unspoken assumptions based on our background.
I happen to originally come from the European country with possibly the strongest private property rights, lowest proportion of publicly owned land, and weakest rights for pedestrians and walkers. A country where landowners have spent eye-watering sums on litigation, all the way to the Supreme Court, to prove that a single path was always access=permissive throughout its history, and never access=yes.
So to me, access=yes canât just be casually summed up as âyou are allowed hereâ. It specifically means âevery member of the public has a legal right to be hereâ. It is a point on a multi-point scale of access rights. So if Iâm told that designated is an access right, I naturally expect a clear description of how it interacts with the other points on that scale. If it belongs at the top of the scale, implying legal access for everybody, that seems like something that should be highlighted wherever the tag is defined.
But I can understand that for someone from a different background, âaccess=yesâ is âjust normalâ, and it is natural to think of designated as expanding on that normal situation, with the relationship to permissive, customers etc being a minor detail barely worth mentioning.
I agree. bicycle=yes means everybody can legally cycle there. If there are conditions and limitations, these should be tagged separately.
Designated implies yes, unless there are other conditions and limitations, which can be tagged separately.
The access values are a sort of scale, but they mix pure legal yes/no access with transport modes (but not all), groups of people (but not all), special permissions (but not all), purposes (but not all). Still, combined with the highway values, most situations can be captured surprisingly well, even though many countries think their situation is very special.
Example of that: Nederland has three different legal types of designated cycleways, whereas OSM recognizes only one: the cycleway. We have the mandatory cycleway, the mandatory moped+cycleway, and the non-mandatory cycleway, all with their own legal assignments, allowed vehicle types (sometimes dependant of yet other conditions) and prohibitions.
It took a while, and lots of wild ideas about special Dutch tagging, which data users would have to know and apply, but in the end all the different types and situations could be mapped and tagged with existing keys and values, so that all OSM data users can use it without knowing Dutch signage and traffic regulations.
Itâs a good point. Until there is a well known âAccessMapâ utilizing all of the access tags, motivation to clear up ambiguities will remain low. Maybe Iâll attempt to make it one day.
I was paraphrasing this interpretation as âtoleratedâ versus âwelcomeâ â the difference between âEh, sure, why not,â and âWhy yes, of course.â The fact remains that yours is only one of several common interpretations.
In other words, a bicycle routing profile should ignore the bicycle=yes tag when deciding whether to route along a given way. As youâre probably aware, precious few routers have ever interpreted bicycle=yes in this manner.
It sounds like youâd tag my countyâs expressways as bicycle=yes. I could get behind that, but for different reasons than what youâve described:
1.designated is only used where the legal access is actually yes (i.e. not permissive or customers or similar) as discussed ad nauseam here and elsewhere.
2. You actually add all the other tags that you need to to make highway=path useful (e.g. all the stuff that is implied by âthis is a way designed for use by bicyclesâ, if appropriate), also as discussed ad nauseam.
3. It is the local custom to use highway=path for this sort of thing.
(somewhat offtopic from the rest of this thread but) thatâs certainly one way that people manage path erosion in the UK, but more common is âconcentrate all erosion in one place and use gravel / paving / boardwalks thereâ.
Fundamentally, a router doesnât tell you everywhere youâre legally allowed to go in a maximalist sense. It only tells you the âbestâ route, for some definition of âbestâ. If some kind of way is essentially a big question mark in terms of suitability, as you claim, a responsible router will discount it out of an abundance of caution. For this reason, we expect car routers to avoid highway=road, because that primary feature tag communicates nothing about suitability.
Of course, a way may be unsuitable for many reasons besides legal access restrictions. To determine suitability, a routing profile considers the primary feature tag and any iterative refinement, access keys, and ideally any physical characteristic tags and an elevation model. Of these factors, the primary feature tag is the most determinative, because irrelevant feature types are usually already filtered out of the routing graph before the profile even has a chance to evaluate them for suitability. After all, thereâs little sense in sending a cyclist to wade in a river or sending a pedestrian to practice the balance beam along the top of a fence, even if thatâs perfectly legal. So mapping a hikeâbike path based on its identity, independent of usage rules, can be useful in a concrete sense.
Ultimately, all these factors are just proxies for âWill the user have a good day or a bad day?â, whether weâre talking about a router or a rendered map used for wayfinding. As a practical matter, highway=cycleway connotes approximately the same suitability as highway=pathbicycle=designated and highway=pathbicycle=yes, depending on your point of view, and more suitability than a bare highway=path.
Youâre legally allowed to bike along the expressway. Itâs a very bad idea if you donât know what youâre doing, so the county sort of keeps it a secret. They donât want to be held liable if someone gets hurt. Think of it as an implicit âgo at your own riskâ situation.
That said, I pass by cyclists on that stretch of expressway all the time â even on recumbent bikes. They assume personal risk, as is their right.
It doesnât solve everything, neither do other solutions. The people who use this solution have to deal with that. As I said, I do, sometimes, map a shared path like this, in a permissive or private environment where regular legal signage and legal designation are replaced with ownerâs rules. The problem that you can have only one access value per transport type is âsolvedâ in that case by using the most restrictive value, i.e. permissive. The paths are most often solitary ways, not associated with a road, so any cyclist or hiker going there will have to use it. A horse=* tag can be valuable.
In sum, I think in general it is a valid and workable solution. Of course, any tagging should be as consistent as possible within a community, but I donât think the quality of OSM data hinges on this issue. We have far worse things to deal withâŠ
I would prefer the boardwalks, and a system to keep the cows and sheep and their produce off the path. A simple HW-path now took me 1,5 miles per mile because of the slaloming, and I didn't see much of the beautiful views, because every next step could shut me out of the pubs and inns. Besides, I don't know aht all the fuss is about: every field is surrounded by walls of loose stones, so who cares that Hadrian wanted a stone wall? :smiley:
Mapping a path in pathless terrain can do that, in case: 1) people follow the on-screen marker instead of watching and looking; 2) devices have GPS accurate to 20 cm.
While the original contribution was about not creating a path, by not walking in line e.a, here the most prominent means to help creating a path is: trail blazing This works without both GPS and maps.
This works without both GPS and maps.