Generic vs. intuitive use of highway=path

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@SomeoneElse

Want to show route relations in the situation where your country has multiple routes over the same bit of tarmac? Show those. If your country doesn’t have those**? Don’t.

** mine doesn’t

Ahem.

I do wonder if we’ll ever arrive at a definitive answer as to which highway=* value correctly and properly applies to this 250-metre stretch:

It's time to address the A8(M)

The A8(M) is a short stretch of road connecting the Bailieston and Swinton Roundabouts in Central Scotland. Only 250ish metres long, the road was originally signed A8(M) but is now signed A8 from one direction and M8 (M73) from the other leaving its appropriate ref value unclear. On OSM the ref value has oscillated back and forth between A8, A8(M), M8 and no ref at all. I’m raising it here to reach an agreement on the appropriate ref value for this short stretch of motorway. Since it continues …

…or if we’ll have to settle for highway=road, the car-centric analogue to highway=path.

@aighes

All I’m saying is, that it could have worked out as well. Everything could have been highway=road and there could have been another tag level_of_importance. Same as it was done for railway where you have railway=rail and usage=* or service=* for what’s the purpose of that rail.

I’ve always viewed the top-level highway=trunk/…/residential tags as a tool for implementing the brilliant rainbow-colored roads of a typical European map. How else to explain the cornucopia of classifications?

(This diagram conveniently ignores the classification-based line weights described earlier. OSM Americana actually overdoes it for the purpose of providing feedback to mappers. Typical American maps make the line weights much more subtle and vary the label typography instead.)

If OSM had been the brainchild of an American and dominated by American mappers familiar with American cartography, maybe we wouldn’t have wound up with so many highway=* values. Maybe we wouldn’t have even called it highway=*. Instead, I think we would’ve had so many endless debates about whether it’s more important to classify freeway/expressway/road/street/driveway versus arterial/collector/local/service that we would’ve all but had to compromise on separate roadway:construction=* and roadway:function=* keys. For sure, we definitely wouldn’t have lumped recreational paths and trails into the same top-level key as streets and highways.

That was a fun thought experiment.

@Tolstoi21

The top-level tag (i.e. footway, cycleway, and path) is able to immediately express the existence (and in the case of a path, the absence) of a roundel-type traffic sign that entails legal rights-of-ways.

It expresses no such thing. What it expresses is an identity, a real-world “preset”, if you will. There is no fundamental rule in the English language that a “footway” must come with a certain sign, and so far the stubborn Americans and their silly sidewalks have succeeded at preventing it from becoming a fundamental rule of OSM’s ontology too.

highway=footway may suggest or imply the existence of a certain sign, depending on context. In some cultures and jurisdictions, traffic signs are so consistent and informative that humans and robots alike can orient their entire lives around the prescriptions of traffic signs. The community has chosen to view signs and reality as one and the same. Everywhere else, we necessarily supplement the signs with common sense, intuition, and sometimes a bit of guesswork. Which is why I agree wholeheartedly with:

@Tolstoi21

While I do not argue that the tripartite top-level tags (cycleway/footway/path) are perfect and forever immutable, I would say that they are a reasonable compromise and absolutely do reflect a fundamental, basic ground truth in much of the world, for most of the ways that are primarily intended non-motorized travel.

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@Nadjita

And while we’re at it, adding priority would also be nice, because in some countries, some types of roads only allow certain modes of transportation as “guests”[1]. Something that people are now deducing from the highway-value, but it really only works with highway=footway and highway=cycleway.

“Yield triangles” are ubiquitous among North America’s shared use paths and backcountry trails, but they have nothing to do with access. They merely establish the right-of-way, akin to priority to the right. Who is the guest, and to whom shall we be rude?

Maybe something along the lines of priority=wheelchair;horse;foot;bicycle would better communicate the 3+-tiered hierarchy of users without impinging on legal access or suitability.