Documenting the problems with `highway=path`

[_MisterY]

@Pypes

not to have any dangerous paths in OSM which irresponsible apps, regardless of the attribution of the highway, might present to users as walking path

“dangerous paths”, yes…
There are several ways why paths can be dangerous. If they are paths at all. So there’s a few problems already. The solutions that can be drawn just from those two sentences:

• mark ways that are not clearly visible on the ground as something else (pathless?)
• apply a difficulty rating (used to be the SAC scale, so at least there some international standard) so that paths can be displayed differently on a map and people know what to expect
• use additional tags (visibility, smoothness, incline, surface) to indicate what is it makes the path difficult

As Alan noted, the point is not to remove these from OSM but to have them distinct, just like there is a clear distinction between a 6-lane highway and a dirt track full of stones in the middle of nowhere.

But definitely we need to set a list of goals and get into shaping them. There were a few recent attempts at that, too:

New siblings of foot/cycle/bridle/way

There is some momentum in the talking community, that mentioned three modes of transport need additional top-level tags in the highway key space to accommodate for the breadth of human traffic not covered by highway=track|service|unclassified|residential|tertiary|…|motorway Beware, the list does not include highway=path, because that was not devised a sibling but the mother of the siblings alluded in this topic – rather it was conceived of a sibling to highway=road, so to say. At least that i l…

History of proposals to fix highway=path ambiguity – and a wayforward?

Many discussions here attest that highway=path is a mess on both ends of its scale. On one end, it is used for (hiking/scrmbling) routes that are either not visible on the ground or require the use of hands and might be dangerous. On the other hand, it is used for ways that almost look like roads, albeit they are not used by cars, but almost by everything else. (I think the only almost guaranteed meaning of highway=path is “you either cannot legally drive a car here or you practically cannot d…

Pathway=* for ways not used by or intended for cars

These threads brought up many valid points regarding highway=path (and adjacent tags). My takeaways: There is a wide agreement that current situation of highway=path is not great (if dissent exists to that general sentiment, it is rare). It applies to things that are very distinct from each other. Nobody seems to believe in a quick solution. That is fully in line with Deprecated features - OpenStreetMap Wiki Some people think that there does not really need to be any proposal for n…

Perhaps we could refine the goals based on the feedback since then.
The issues I see so far is:

• the paths that are not visible
• difficulty scale (0-grade - Adding T0/strolling to sac_scale, SAC scale)
• shared-use paths (pedestrians and different vehicles)
• motorcycleways, snowmobiles, snorkelling