Feature Proposal - Voting - highway=scramble

It took nine years and countless dissertation-length issue comments for osm-carto to render surfaces - a cartographic decision for which there is plenty of precedent to draw on. So I’d estimate sac_scale might be supported c. 2032.

4 Likes

I don’t have the time to read through the 124 comments just in issue #1500 that it would take to figure out exactly why it’s not rendered. But here’s a comment from Imagico from February, which I think has essentially been his opinion about it for a few years now if not from the beginning of people asking for sac_scale to be rendered.

  • sac_scale: is documented to provide an aggregate of specific dangers of hiking in alpine environments but is evidently used also in non-alpine environments with obviously different semantics - which are unclear and, from looking at the data in a few places, evidently vary.

So yes, your technically correct that the tag is used in non-alpine environments, but it’s not all the same. IMO treating it otherwise would be like saying a tag has global usage when it is used correctly in Europe but everywhere else the usage was due to vandalism. Well, maybe not that extreme, but it’s a difference without a purpose as far as if it will be rendered or not. At the end of the day if alpine environments are the only places that are tagged in a semantically correct and consistent way then wherever it is mapped literally doesn’t matter.

Oh that’s a different thing; I didn’t say that it should be used outside of mountains (alpine areas), but it doesn’t matter where those mountains are. I agree that it’s often used outside these, but there are tons of tags which aren’t used as defined but that are rendered by carto.

1 Like

From the comments on the proposal page in the Wiki, especially the one by @Mateusz_Konieczny I gather, that some opponents considered the threshold too low, so it would affect too much, e.g. some favourite paths in the Tatras.

Please do not cite this. It is wrong. This is just a copy of what somebody at the DAV, probably a graphic designer, came up with some time in the past. This is comparing apples and oranges. See the paragraph before: There I made a table of what I observed on the ground from signpost markings with what openstreetmap data contains. This got replaced and ridiculed with this copycat chart under pretence of quoting “authoritative sources”, as if this was wikipedia?

@Hungerburg, one of the criteria for distinguishing between path and via_ferrata in the via_ferrata proposal is:

If we merge this with one of the statements in your proposal:

we end up with the conclusion that a scramble is a path.

I interpret Mateusz’s criticism in such way that highway=scramble cannot be delineated sharply enough. And in my opinion the threshold is certainly too low to justify that such segments are no longer shown on the standard map and at the same time too high to really catch all non-walkable (from the perspective of average Joe) paths.

At the Wiki article isn’t really clear about that since while it says “The key sac_scale=* is used to classify hiking trails in mountainous areas”, there’s nothing that stops someone from using T1 in whatever environment they want to. Really though, “mountainous” is kind of an ambiguous misnomer anyway. That’s a lot of the problem.

Most or all of those tags were rendered back in the day before Imagico started being the main maintainer of the project a few years ago. I’m not it’s 100% his doing, but they have been a lot less lenient about those types of things in the last couple of years since he mostly took over. There’s actually been some discussion to remove rendering for the less well defined tags, but it’s always easier to add rendering for something then to remove it. Either way, you can’t just point to a tag that was rendered 15 years ago as a justification to do the same with sac_scale. Obviously projects and the priorities of maintainers change over time.

Lacking own hands on experience, I cannot decide this File:Krywan podejscie.jpg - Wikimedia Commons from the photo. One commenter here even said, we should not create tags, that are not verifiable from aerial. So yes,

this might qualify as a scramble. Perhaps a uiaa=0, yds=1 scramble? All I can see on the photo, there is no path there.

Judging from the photo T4 probably would not be all that wrong.

I would strongly disagree with that and I also don’t think that the fuzzy threshold is the main problem with highway=scramble.

Most definitely, and I would even go so far as to say that this would already be a big no-no from the perspective of average Joe.

If the people on the photo aren’t average Joes and Janes, then I do not understand what the reference means :wink: From the picture alone the location could very well lie on a “occasionally you might have to use hands for balance” demanding mountain hiking route combined with “intermediate” to “bad” trail visibility, because the trail/route, even though invisible on the photo, might be easily found from assessing the terrain on site?

So, after some search: Here the path to Node: ‪Kriváň‬ (‪260278694‬) | OpenStreetMap is a T6 (the grade evolved over time, look at the changesets history), here Krivan (2494m) - Nationalberg der Slowaken [hikr.org] a T3+ and some more photos with lots of Joes and Janes. Such a difficult alpine hike is too prominent to not show on the openstreetmap standard view :slight_smile:

And they won’t usually show up with their hiking boots on a 2000+m peak by accident. :wink:


Looks like it became T5 (and shortly after T6) when the first average Jane with an OSM account broke a sweat on the way to the peak. :laughing:

Cable cars etc. bring them there; ok, there are warning signs like this:

But some won’t be stopped in flip flops to get to the top when they are so close :roll_eyes:

So a different rendering for the average Joe would be like this sign.

Would it not be sufficient to define highway=trail as something not normally used by ordinary pedestrians or cyclists, which would otherwise be marked as highway=path?

This way, at least all paths including and beyond sac_scale=demanding_mountain_hiking and mtb:scale=2 would be included, without creating a conflict with things like highway=path + informal=yes in urban areas.

No, I don’t think it will, because as I said above:

Forget about “OSM perfection”, “lazy app developers” are the target here. I don’t think we could get away with this though:

highway=dont_render_this_on_a_general_purpose_map_you_idiot

:smiley:

1 Like

As a general rule, if you give a tag a plain English name, its usage will tend towards the common meaning of that word.

It doesn’t matter if you write screeds on the wiki saying “aha, when we say trail we actually mean ‘hardcore climbing path for the experienced only’”. Someone will - entirely understandably - type “trail” into their editor for a nice multi-use path like the Katy Trail or the Taff Trail or whatever, think “yup, this is a trail”, and tag it accordingly.

This is why highway=scramble was a really good suggestion and why highway=demanding_path etc. really is not.

4 Likes

One can argue it the other way round, too:
highway=scramble can be mistaken for this

And with demanding_trail it can be argued that it’s obvious:

I think there is no perfect solution; introducing a dozen new highway=* tag like highway=scramble for every kind of hazardous trail for the average Joe to split them from highway=path is one way to go, introducing a main highway=* tag like highway=demanding_trail the other. Probably a pros and cons collection would help here :wink:

3 Likes

To say “was” may be true, makes me sad a little. Especially, after learning, that the path up to Kriváň very likely prompted one prominent opposing vote in order not to hide it from OSM-Carto. While in reality, the path is tagged sac_scale=difficult_alpine_hiking (which is definitely wrong) which hides it on hiking maps, as @ezekielf mentioned, but lets it still show in all those maps that do not give shit about the subject.

I think, sane editors give a short description, and highway=scramble has one such, that cannot be mistaken for that.

@Quaternion Please remove the twitter link. Such mistaggings happen much more often, there is no reason to put a person on the “Pranger/pillory?”

PS:

I just did that, RfC: highway=desire

1 Like

I underlying is problem that these are confusing because they are being created in vacuum. There needs to be a set of overly broad levels of difficulty. Each level would imply some combination of “features” that might contribute to the typeof difficulty. It should be modeled on the common difficulty scale.

Before someone asks why not just use sac_value. Hiking scale are usually regional. Inexperienced hikers don’t really understand them. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them are parents trying to match thier family’s ability to a trail and what kind of equipment is need in order to stay safe.

That why OSM needs a project wide scale where is level should no longer than a paragraph of text and includes a list of subtags common to that level. Resulting in an easy to descrion that is simple to translate without losing meaning.

For example, on a sac_scale=demanding_mountain_hiking (T3) section, you may or may not need hands. In contrast, scramble=yes/no will make this clear. Please note that for T4, a scramble is not optional but one mandatory requirement.

In the end, sac_scale=* is an aggregation, a summary of several aspects – one of them being “scramble yes/no?”. Some of these aspects can be explicitly tagged in OSM as they have their own tag, while others can’t, as mentioned several times in this thread :slightly_smiling_face:

IMHO highway=scramble’s definition can never be “sharpened enough”, because it requires us to distinct what is heavily overlapping and thus is “natually” not distinct for certain ways. One OSM way can only be tagged as highway=scramble XOR highway=via_ferrata even tough both usage styles are possible. And climbing UIAA grade I+II is scrambling by definition, too, so another overlap. This dilemma becomes more intense considering other suggestions like highway=mountaineering. This is one main motivation (more in my vote) for the suggestion to introduce a relatively broad highway-value for “somehow demanding paths” (hiding the way in maps+routers for avagerage Joe) and refining that primary tag with secondary tags for the single aspects like scramble, via ferrata equipment, climbing grades & equipment, visibility, harzard of falling, snowfields, waymarks, steepness, firmness of ground, etc. Because these are not values but secondary tags, as many of them may occour in combination for a single way. Thus, we do not need to work out an agreed definition that is clearly telling apart overlapping concepts/taggings/usages like scramble, via_ferrata, climbing and mountaineering but instead their definitions are allowed to overlap as in happens in physical life – if only one applies to a way, fine, if all 4 apply, also fine.

If you have an idea for a clearer definition to tell apart a “normal” and a “demanding” path than I already suggested – which was not convincing at that time – please share your idea, because when I did just read this thread again, an overwhelming majority agrees that highway=path is too overloaded so we shall proceed

12 months later…

6 Likes