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

[_MisterY]

@alan_gr

Sac_scale: defined specifically for hiking, no appropriate value for many “easy”
paths.

I see a lot of easy or urban hikes tagged as T1 and find it to be appropriate.

@Tolstoi21

Anyone who actually visits a pathway or cycleway has immediate access to fill all the needed descriptive tags. It might be possible to add the surface and width tags to well exposed and relatively wide paths from aerial pictures too.

This is way too optimistic for the paths we are talking about under Pathless. The width ranges from 30cm to several hundred meters and the surface may change every couple of meters. Sometimes it is even hard to say what the surface is, as there is some dirt, lots of stones, and an occasional grass lump here and there, for example. Aerial pictures don’t help at all as the path(less) is not visible on them (nor is obvious in reality).

@Tolstoi21

Nagging the mappers about the absence of the descriptive tags might encourage them to (physically) revisit them.

Here, here and here are some photos that describe what I’m talking about. I can share more, if needed. I was there recently and still would not be able to describe the attributes you’d expect.

I agree with Alan that requiring these tags would totally put me off from adding these routes (which also solves the problem, I guess).