I’m not sure if that is a rhetorical question. Assuming it is genuine, and at the risk of repeating something that most participants have read numerous times:
By using 21 (or something) different main tags for roads used by motor vehicles, we have (perhaps accidentally) given many data consumers the impression that highways with the same main tag will have broadly similar characteristics, at least within a region. Ignoring any sub tags on roads will usually give a “good enough” rendering for most non-specialised purposes: there generally isn’t a need to further split, say, highway=tertiary. But applying that to highway=path means that difficult and dangerous routes end up rendered the same as flat paved paths in urban parks.
There has been some progress in educating renderers aimed at outdoor recreation to look at other tags. But it’s a lot more difficult to tell generalist renderers “you need to look at sac_scale, and not only that, you need to decide which points on that scale you should render differently from each other, and they might interact with surface and trail visibility and…” And unfortunately, people do use generalist renderers for outdoor recreation. A lot of the motivation for proposals to split out some of the “difficult end” of highway=path is to ensure that data consumers that use the new tag have made a conscious decision to do so.
There is also a secondary issue of mapper convenience. Surveying paths outside urban areas takes a lot of time. There is a certain mental load in trying to keep track of variations in surface, width, difficulty, visibility, difficulty for mountain bikes, and so on. Especially when some of them are expressed by scales that are not easy to interpret. Ideally we would all do this, but it’s not easy. In the meantime, summarising a certain level of difficulty just by marking “highway=scramble” has the potential to get us part of the way there. Personally, I feel like it is relatively easy to separate “the bits where I had to use my hands” from “everything else”. I also note that for locations I know well, descriptions in newspapers/books/blogs tend to be consistent in saying things like “it’s a steep but easy walk except for the last 30 metres which is a bit of a scramble”, or “you’ll probably need to use your hands for the bit just before the summit”. So while obviously there are grey areas, I think it’s a relatively objective classification (certainly with fewer grey shades than tertiary versus unclassified, for example).
Well said. The road classification system allows a data consumer to make a reasonable map even if they only use the highway tag and ignore everything else. This map will lack detail and could be much better if it took other tags into account, but it at least will show some variation of road types and thus won’t be too deceptive to the reader.
I would like to see a similar type of basic classification for paths that sets a floor for the most naive or lazy of data consumers. Just like with road classification this would be the bare minimum, not the ideal state. A high quality map should look beyond the basic classification to add more detail from attribute tags. There will always be low quality maps out there, and designing our tagging so those end up a bit less deceptive than they are currently would be a good thing.
Following the idea, I think it means we would have to keep highway=path for the paths on the safe side, like footcyclepaths and so on, because retagging would mean we have to decide which objects will potentially (or temporarily) get lost for people and institutions not updating their styles. maybe highway=scamble should be given a second chance?
Or alternatively, on the safe end we could introduce a rule that path is no longer used for combined foot and cycleways and cycleway should be preferred over footway if both are allowed, so a shared footcyclepath would be tagged highway=cycleway foot=designated (and never as highway=path). Path would remain for unsigned ways narrower than a car, scramble could be introduced on top to avoid paths where you have to use your hands (or literally no path there for a stretch, but there is one on both ends).
The only issue is: Are you sure those never ever co-exists. Like a path too difficult to be a highway=path will never ever have as well a rating for MTB and horse riding?
At least the pictures/descriptions on mtb:scale would in my understanding also fit to sac_scale=demanding_mountain_hiking.
Is that the case? The actual, physical difference of a highway=unclassified,tertiary,secondary,primary has huge differences even between rural areas and urban areas. It suggest they are somehow different and it looks nice on the map, but a highway=tertiary even within on region can be a 1.5-lane road with poor surface or a 4-lanes road with bicycle lanes and sidewalk. The only thing those different values express is, that relatively a primary-road might be better (=faster to drive on) for cars than a secondary-road. There is zero information in those tags whether you can use them with your sports car or might need a SUV.
Well, personally, I would start scramble at alpine_hiking. demanding_mountain_hiking wth scramble would make sense only in case of a unmarked invisible trail to me, but could qualify for pathless too. Nobody denies there are grey areas, they are just much smaller than as of now (I do not map roads above tracks usually but reading from wiki descriptions, difference between trunk, primary and motorway is a bit blurry to me too).
Crazy people do crazy stuff so some scrambles could very well have mtb:scale=6. I do not see a problem with that. Specialized applications for MTB can still choose to consume highway=scramble and check for mtb:scale. If it is there, great. If it is not, it can make a much better guess how and if to render it. I am not a horse person but I dobt you could take horses to alpine_hiking.
My beef with that, climbing:… gets evaluated by specialist/niche consumers. So pushing the climbing: namespace interferes with that. Obviously UIAA II is within reach of seasoned hikers/ramblers/scramblers, both going up and down that. Not certain with UIAA III and certain that UIAA IV out of that – Upwards a pleasure climb/ramble/scramble, but the other direction? I see use of an intermediary! Of course, some might argue, if the main body weight is resting on the feet, it is walking… so a path?
I think that’s probably right, or perhaps the sign predates the opening of the wooden bridge which is quite new - previously there was no way to cross the estuary here.As the bridge does allow cyclists subject to giving priority to pedestrians, it would make no sense to prohibit cyclists from approaching from one side (there is no such sign from the other direction).
But it’s true this is probably getting a bit off topic, maybe better to focus on the 1st two photos. What I was really getting at was: this bridge and path have no signs directly designating it for anybody. Does that mean that if “shared use paths” were given their own tag, it wouldn’t qualify?
This again makes me wonder, where do proposals to split “shared use paths” from trails leave “unspecified use” paths? If shared use is interpreted strictly as “paths with a blue circular sign with pedestrians and bicycle”, it seems little would change in countries that don’t use this sign much.
This does not hold in Austria and I wager to say does not hold in Germany neither, whether all of Germany or only some regions. Is Spain part of Scandinavia?
By Law in Germany, cycleway is not shared use. That is where @aighes and @Nop are from.
Regarding physical construction, this holds in Austria. Regarding legal allowance, the law is not clear on that, the courts so far have declined to give opinion and the legislative the same.
I would guess that worldwide mosthighway=path are unpaved, and most countries have more important things to worry about than putting up signs and worrying about whether or not people cycle there. The suitability of these paths will vary a lot depending on the terrain.
I’m thinking of something like
It may well be that both walking and cycling are legal there, but that’s still quite different from a shared-use path.
But I’m not sure this distinction is worth the effort to establish yet another highway tag. We already have cycleway (the second example is in Britain so it’s mapped cycleway) and even in communities that don’t want to use cycleway, tags like surface and smoothness exist that can make the difference clear. I don’t see how it can harm to add a subtag path= either.
The sort of examples where I do think it would be good to move to a different highway= tag is scrambling and mountaineering routes:
I’d be fine. But that is not like what is mapped path looks like in most cases.
BTW: The Aonach Scramble picture likely UIAA I, the way up Everest perhaps a highway=via_ferrata – the rope is not of steel, but Everest is a fixed rope climb.
Here you nicely illustrate that tagging is not based only on legal acces (who is legal somewhere) but also what is feasible (who a way is made for). Thank you for proving our point :-D.
Again I do not get your point at all. How is potential shared_use different from cycleway? One is in OSM, it somehow works. You say that shared_use would be difficult to tag in OSM. How is it more difficult than tagging cycleway or footway? Their legal status and physical condition lso varies widely between countries. It seems to me either you lost what you were trying to assert or I completely misunderstand how what you say supports your argument.
I meant the first meaning. I do not just want to rename path, I would ideally abolish it and replace it with about 7 or more different primary tags (one of them being shared_use).
You have a point here: For shared-use paths in the first sense - not any path where cycling is legal, but ways “designed to accommodate the movement of pedestrians and cyclists” - there is already a well established combination of tags.
That combination of tags is foot=designated plus bicycle=designated… plus either highway=cycleway or highway=path, depending on the preference of mappers. (UK uses cycleway, Germany uses path, etc.)
Sorry, I don’t understand what you meant by “the usage”
AS @Hungerburg repeatedly points out, scrambles are distinguished by using hands, so the division is mostly by usage and also by the some class of physical characteristic (respecting that one tag can manifest differently in different parts of the world, but in a similar way in one area) these two usually go hand in hand.
So shared_use is something that is easy to ride your bike on (so usually constructed) and also wide enough for people to comfortably past each other. Scramble is something where biking is prety much impossible. Trail is something single-file that can be walked over (and possibly used by MB or horses). Fooway is similar but is more built-up and urban and probaly wider. Jus duck-tagging. I would be simpler for mappers, simpler for renderers. There would be grey area tha could be specified wih secondary tags, but the difference would be small so it would not be a big deal.
I mean, common, horse=yes for scramble? Really?
How is that preferable to pathway=shared_use but for the sheer momentum of it?
No. With paths that are hiking trails, based on my observation, access tag is wildly misused to also indicate practical usage. To be precise, I should have used horse_scale= that I did not even know existed. However, the main distinction between different paths/pathways should not be based on legal access (usage in your parlance? - though I can see you use the word in two meanings: 1) practical usage 2) legal usage)
but practical usability=what it physically looks like.
Sidenote: I find the winking smiley mildy passively-aggresive. Well, it is more economical, it is duck-tagging, so infinitely easier to grasp, it is easier to parse for renderers, it would solve the path controversy=ambiguity of nobody having no idea what path is.
As for access tags, not really, shared_use would have foot and bicycle implicit (and all the others probably too dependent on the region, co motorcycle=no, horse=yes, but that can vary regionally).
For the ways that are not signed and physically allow comfortable usage of motorcycles, biked and what not, we could have either path(way)=motorcycleway/multi_use_path. However, for trails (i.e. ways not really suitable for normal motrocycles and bikes, which I think are the majority of paths now, one would use highway=trail, with appropriate difficulties scales to add suitability for different modes of transport. Again, you ae fixated on legal access, but I do not see a reason why that should form the criteria to base division of highway=path on. Shared_use being the exception here, but with a big practical usability caveat.
