I find it very practical for hiking paths, as well. Narrow paths indicate that it may be difficult to pass another person or a group coming from the other side. It is usually narrow for a reason (steep drop on one side, rock on the other), making it automatically harder, more risky, and lower priority, unless you’re looking for adventure.
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? hazard=* but there are no signs, danger, maybe a class ! !! !!!, step_up, step_down, to step on a rock to go further.
We can invent further sub-tags to describe minute details of every inch of a path. But that will only make it less likely for anyone to look at those.
I’m pretty sure now that, if we can have a primary and secondary roads, for sure we can have a narrow and a wide path, along with others.
Secondary tags will always be “nice to have”, to describe the path in more detail. But, when on foot, a difference between a Karreweg (wheel-way) and a narrow path is as big as between a motorway and a service road for cars.
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I observe that some people regularly attribute paths with width. Width is certainly something that would appeal to friends of caliper based verifiability. (Hint hint, OSM-Carto)
I am not confident this can be fulfilled on unpaved paths. They vary in width within short distance e.g. from 0.5 to 3.0. I also observe, that widths of paved or compacted paths and tracks quite often wrong. I never understood if those mappings specified min_width, max_width or average_width.
Perhaps nominal_width to the rescue? 0.1=cat walk, 0.25 is single file attentive walk, 1.0 is single file casual walk, 1.5 is double file casual walk and no need to step aside for opposite traffic. 2.0 opposite traffic with open umbrellas held up the air.
PS: Kompass (map maker) in the map legend of theirs translates Karrenweg as mule track, mulattiera. Back-translated this means Saumpfad, so space for a mule and a guide side by side: Not sure, 1.5?
That is the key. The path characteristics should refer to some decent distance or average, or minimum width.
Also, what matters is that a “narrow path” can’t be made bigger, I.e. due to terrain. If only the visible path is narrow but one can step aside on the grass to walk past someone coming from the other side, then it is not a narrow path.
If the Karreweg is not suitable for a mule or a cart, then it is a wide path.
Some of these things seem to be common sense.
I have thought about it again and yes, this would probably be the best solution. I think width is a bit of a problematic tag because it varies a lot and is not that important to hikers or mountain bikers. Instead, it would be better to distinguish between mountain hiking, alpine hiking or mountain biking. Similar to highway=via_ferrata: this tag is very well established, even though people were against it and wanted to keep using highway=path.
I think it’s not so easy to determine the min width or even average width of a whole path and wether you are able to step aside everywhere.
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Mountain hiking and mountain biking are not mutually exclusive.
No, but a line could be drawn if a path is mainly used by mountain bikers or hikers.
Via ferrata climbing and mountain hikes are also not mutually exclusive 
And it doesn’t have to be. The world is not going to collapse because of it.
The section one knows should be straightforward to decide and it would still be better than just path.
Is it easy to decide whether the whole road is service or tertiary?
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Except for in the National Park and in designated Wilderness Areas (neither of which allow bikes), and a few purpose built mountain-bike only trails, most trails around here are used more or less equally by mountain bikers and hikers/trail runners. What problem are we trying to solve with this? To help people find trails that they can mountain bike on? They will miss out on trails because only 49% of the use is mountain biking vs hiking. That isn’t very helpful. To help hikers avoid trails with mountain bikes? They will end up hiking on trails with 49% mountain bike traffic, which is probably not what they had in mind. This type of categorization is like trying to categorize people as either “beer drinkers” or “coffee drinkers”, as there is a likely a huge overlap. They are two separate, and largely unrelated, behaviors.
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Well, there are places in the world where there are extensive purpose built single tracks. 60 km here for example: Mapa stezek | Singltrek pod Smrkem
Local map provider (mapy.cz), that somehow uses OSM, but I think for Czechia mostly uses its own data, shows it appropriately - differenty from other trails, indicates that they are one way:
Not sure how you would do such a rendering (which I think is very good for outdoor purposes) based on pure OSM data now.
I think “pathway=single_track_mtb” should mostly cover trails like these (they are not even legal for pedestrians I think).
Look at the number of secondary tags it uses (and is still rendered just like parths for pedestrians nearby, only indicating one-way ness. But from looking at the map, you would not know you are not supposed to walk there):
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Let me quote @Hungerburg from a related thread:
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To show a data consumer example, this adds highway=leisuretrack and highway=gallop to the list of highways that a map style based on that schema can display. It does it by looking at other tags in the data. An example gallop is here (in OSM). It’d certainly be possible to do something like that for MTB trails too.
This is diverging a bit from highway=path though - neither the horse gallops in my examples nor the MTB one earlier are really highway=path variants.
What I posted here is a path.
@Duja That is against the logic of leisure=, which denotes places, and these are very much paths. Also, I am pretty sure that if I went ahead and remove highway=path and added leisure, it would be quickly reverted.
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Well, exactly the same arguments have been made for highway=path and highway=via_ferrata, but have not been confirmed in practice, despite the fact that there is a large overlap, as in this case. And secondly, this may be the case in America, but not in all countries (esspecially Europe) where hikers and mountain bikers are very separate.
As it is with many OSM issues, Europe is the unique case. I think you’ll find very few trails worldwide where hikers are prohibited.
As you know, looking for strict logic in OSM tags is an unfruitful exercise. For better or for worse, leisure is the top-level key for all kinds of sport grounds, and leisure=track has been used for similar structures, Wiki even addresses the issue at hand, bold mine:
A dedicated track for running, cycling and other non-motorised racing such as horses, greyhounds, typically not a part of the normal network of ways and paths.
This is not a replacement for the normal highway=* values for ways that are a part of the general network of ways but which are used for non-motorised sports. For instance: a path that in a forest with a mountainbiking route on it, is still a highway=path.
So, if used primarily for mtb downhill recreation and competition, it makes perfect sense to use leisure=track; if it’s just a mixed-use path I agree it should be a highway=path.
Conceptually, single-use downhill tracks resemble ski pistes, but their current tagging scheme is unlike anything we have: the top-level tag for a downhill ski piste is piste:type… 
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I do not see a problam having tags that occur only in one part of the world.
I think that is impractical. These are integrated into the rest of publicly accessible space much more than ahtletic stadiums. Having them in different namespace (and possibly not rendered at all) would cause problems (people surprised by their existance, edit wars to make them again paths). Leisure=track could be a secondary tag, but I think it is wholly unsuitable for a primary tag for these. It is not like they are behind a fence and not crossi general purpose trails.
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I agree. It feels like we’re having infinite discussions about ‘paths’ and not-paths trying to come up with a global solution.
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Uh? This is simply not true.
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