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

[Woazboat]

@Tolstoi21

Ceterum censeo : we should also treat ways that are Duck Tagged with only a highway=cycleway as similarly erroneously (or imperfectly) tagged ways and nag users to add descriptive tag to them!

We’ve already talked about this here. Unlike highway=path, highway=cycleway provides a reasonably high guarantee that a way is perfectly suitable for your average cyclist and (way) more often than not is a ‘high quality’ path.

---

As has already been said here in this thread and in other recent threads on this topic, additional physical detail tags should be tagged if possible (more detail is always good), but they are not going to solve this problem.

@Woazboat

About simply adding additional tags:

In a lot of cases, we simply do not have tags that can express that easily.

What we do have is a tagging scheme for legal access (access=*) and various tags describing physical characteristics of a way (surface=*, smoothness=*, width=*, incline=*, trail_visibility=*, etc…).

Legal access is, as has been mentioned before, not the issue here. That is usually pretty clearly defined and the tagging scheme is also quite straightforward and unambiguous. The problem is whether it is practical to use a path for walking/cycling.

The physical characteristics of a way can help with that decision, but the problem is that they are extremely tedious to tag and can also be fairly hard to tag accurately.
If I’m hiking along a hiking trail, it’s obvious whether a path is suitable for cycling or not, but there’s no easy way to express that. I don’t want to stop every 10 meters and get out my phone to tag the surface and smoothness of a piece of way, even less do I want to get out a tape measure to tag the width.
Adding these tags remotely is often simply impossible since you really need the on-the-ground information for these tags.

sac_scale=* and mtb:scale=* are the best contenders here, but they also highlight an additional problem: Many data consumers simply don’t know or care about additional tags and don’t evaluate them. Having different main tags for these highways that each have very different implications is a feature not a bug.

@Woazboat

@bagis

For me highway=cycleway and highway=footway just adds confusion, deprecating them would direct mappers and consumers towards handling highway=path together with other tags.

A big reason why that approach was bound to fail and leaves us with the mess we currently have (even though it does make sense in a way) is that we do not really have any tagging schemes that describe the practicality of using a path with a bicycle, etc…
The access tagging scheme is only concerned with legal matters (which is a good thing, don’t dilute it by mixing other things into it).
Tags that describe the physical properties such as surface, smoothness, width … can help to make a judgement whether a path is suitable to ride a bike on, but they are very time consuming and difficult to tag. Picking the right values can be hard even when you are right there, standing directly on the path you are trying to describe. Doing it accurately using only aerial images, even after having actually walked a path is bordering on impossible.

If I see a mountain hiking path on the map or on aerial imagery, I know that using it with a bicycle (not talking about MTBs) is completely impractical, but I have no way to actually add that information.

---

@_MisterY

@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).

@alan_gr

@Tolstoi21

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

Surveying paths on foot is incredibly slow. My record for one day is about 40km, but that was on flat ground and good surfaces where a lot of surveying had already been done by other mappers. In a mountainous area 20km in a day would be good going - maybe less if not previous surveyed. And once you’ve done that, even adding the data can be slow and difficult. I often find that while I feel I have been taking photos at regular intervals, I didn’t actually take enough to properly map width, for example. Nagging me to spend every weekend for a year revisiting a mountain range because I didn’t consider smoothness for wheeled vehicles when I was hiking definitely won’t encourage me!

(also see the previous quotes in this post)
Let’s face it, no one is going on a multi-hour difficult hike and stop every few meters just to tag a hiking trail as ‘actually really a hiking trail and not a shared foot-/cycleway, motorcycle road or similar’ in OSM. That’s more or less what would be required with the current physical detail tags.
Mapping details like that while out in the field/mountain is also not only extremely inconvenient, it’s also often simply practically not possible. When you are on a 10+ hour hike and have to keep up the pace in order to safely arrive at your destination before darkness falls, you simply can’t stop to take our your phone for OSM.
(Or you can’t make frequent stops because you’d hold up your hiking group, or you have to catch the bus, or …)

---

@alan_gr

@_MisterY

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

I do that too, but for paths that in some way feel like “hiking” trails. But the context here is a proposal to enforce additional tags for all types of footway. I don’t think T1 is appropriate for a sidewalk, for example, as walking on a sidewalk is not hiking. So I don’t think sac_scale is a candidate to be a required tag. The point I was making is that if we are enforcing tags, all except maybe surface have problems.

The SAC hiking scale is only defined for a limited range of difficulties and does not include ways with no difficulty at all. It’s also limited on the upper end because that is covered by other rating systems (SAC mountaineering/climbing scale).
I’ve been considering proposing e.g. sac_scale=no in order to have a tag that could be added to low difficulty ways outside the sac scale range. That should absolutely not be added to every single path in the world or be somehow required. The limited intended use case for this tag would be for e.g. approaches or sections on hiking routes where people might otherwise think that the tag is missing and tag it as T1 just to have a sac_scale=* tag.