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

[supsup]

@Woazboat

And yet at the same time it’s de-valuing the meaning of sac_scale=hiking itself. I think it’s wrong to toss these two ways into the same category.

Definitely. See here: Adding T0/strolling to sac_scale

@Woazboat

It’s not attempting to redefine highway=path for mappers, that’s just the safe assumption / lowest common denominator for usability that data consumers already need to make today.

However that is not a safe assumption as long as we have paths that are difficult_alpine_hiking and your second picture sharing one tag :-D. I mean, I could definitely work with voting on such assumption and limiting pathto something narrower, but I am probably in a minority there :-).

@Woazboat

Being able to quickly tag something like “at least T3 or higher”, “somewhere between T3 and T4”, or “not higher than T2” would be very helpful and would still provide valuable information. These ranges/fuzzy estimations could then be improved further and narrowed down by someone else (or yourself in the future).

I can imagine adopting notation like (inspired by Python but could be different)

sac_scale=demanding_mountain_hiking:alpine_hiking for T3 to T4 difficultyand sac_scale=alping_hiking: for at least alpine hking. Though I am notsure if it would make edit wars about precise classification less or more severe :-D.