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.
(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 …)
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.
It is my understanding that sac_scale=hiking just means, there are no difficulties whatsoever to expect. In German “Weg gut gebahnt” – google-translated “Path well paved” – not in a sense of asphalted, but proverbially no hindrances.
From its definition, sac_scale has no lower limit. Any consumer that downgrades paths tagged sac_scale=hiking relies on things outside the scope – they perhaps think that its only used to tag approach paths to mountain hiking routes, or other easy hiking routes. There may be something to this. It does not say more about the path than can be said with surface=ground. Yet, I’d never apply this on a separately mapped sidewalk.
So for the next decade, waiting for foot_scale to fill this gap. And if you ask me: If should be a little bit more detailed in the lower grades.
Alternatively, we could propose an attribute to highway=path: stroll=yes
It would be quite a logical to think that, given that the wiki says "The key sac_scale= is used to classify hiking trails in mountainous areas with regard to the difficulties to be expected., and “use this tag solely on ways used for hiking, as it solves a domain specific need”.
That’s how I use it, as I had never heard of sac_scale outside OSM so the OSM wiki page is all I have to go on. I don’t take the “mountainous areas” part entirely literally if I am mapping paths outside mountainous areas with an equivalent level of difficulty, e.g. along the top of a cliff. But I have always assumed that it is for paths used for hiking.
So as I map it, there is a meaningful distinction between paths with sac_scale=hiking and paths without sac_scale. Roughly speaking I use sac_scale as a hint that you might want to prepare a little bit more than for a walk along a sidewalk or in an urban park, for a variety of possible reasons (rougher surface, more isolated, steeper, needs better footwear than beach flip-flops etc etc).
If it turns out that sac_scale=hiking could apply to any easy path whatsoever, implying that sac_scale=hiking conveys no meaning at all as it’s the same as no sac_scale tag, I think I’ll just give up.
That was I to have proposed using presets: Should be good to collect, which attributes actually useful to attach to paths. Only effort in this topic by @alan_gr – The result is a bit thin, unfortunately, I also cannot give guidance here.
I also hope, sac_scale tagging stays confined to the sphere of recreational activities. When I temporarily took over foot_scale RfC I wanted this to become applicable to anything pedestrian, but it did not work out.
Yeah, it’s a mappers world on forum and github at the other end.
Many mapping proposals and (re)tagging prohects would benefit from commitment by data users/validators/tool developers, but there is no mechanism for that. At the mapping end, it’s “we map, they render/route/et cetera”; at the data user end it’s “we’ll see when we get there’if you create an issue”.
OTOH, we mappers do think about rendering and routing, but it is seldom reality checked. The other way around, we don’t accept one data user’s verdict about mapping issues. A forum or subforum discussing (technical, usablity) issues about mapping, tagging and proposals, would be good, I think, but it would probably need fierce moderation.
I don’t get the impression that highway=* values primarily refer to purpose or usage. One can infer a purpose or usage, but it isn’t inherent to the value.
Identity
Sometimes, the highway=* key is used as a thematic key, essentially a metonym for “transportation”, analogous to natural=*, emergency=*, or healthcare=*. The following values answer the question “What is it?” using plain-English nouns:
What is highway=motorway? It is a motorway.
What is highway=motorway_junction? It is a motorway junction.
What is highway=cycleway? It is a cycleway.
What is highway=footway? It is a footway.
What is highway=bridleway? It is a bridleway.
What is highway=raceway? It is a raceway.
What is highway=busway? It is a busway.
What is highway=bus_stop? It is a bus stop.
What is highway=crossing? It is a crossing.
What is highway=elevator? It is an elevator.
What is highway=rest_area? It is a rest area.
What is highway=living_street? It is a living street.
What is highway=via_ferrata? It is a via ferrata.
What is highway=path? It is a path.
etc.
Each of these answers is an identity; from that identity we can infer a purpose or usage. Up to this point, each answer can be found in a British English dictionary – even “path”. The dictionary definitions might not line up 100% with OSM’s, but at least one can explain any discrepancy as mere nuance. No matter how much circumlocution we require, a bevy of secondary tags are still incapable of stating the identity of a feature.
I don’t know if anyone ever uses “scramble” as a noun to refer to places where you have to scramble, but English has a tendency to nominalize verbs, so highway=scramble would still fit the pattern.
Classification
Other times, we presume that the key highway already means it’s a literal highway in the sense of a road or street. Instead of repeating that information, the following values answer the question “What kind of highway is it?” using adjectives that naturally form compounds with “road” or “street” in English:
highway=trunk is a trunk road highway
highway=trunk_link is a trunk road’s link road highway
highway=primary is a primary street highway
highway=secondary is a primary street highway
highway=tertiary is a secondary street highway
highway=unclassified is an unclassified street highway
highway=residential is a residential street highway
highway=service is a service road highway
highway=track is a track road highway
The use of highway=* can be slightly confusing, because “highway” is the word for a motorway in some dialects, but it hasn’t turned out to be a major issue. Instead, the main point of disagreement is often about whether these “kinds” correspond to functional classifications, legal designations, or something else. There are alternative keys for these aspects, such as designation=* and network=*, but no one seems to care as much about them as these highway=* classification values.
Something something
Recent discussions have mentioned values or definitions that don’t fit this pattern:
I always thought highway=road means it’s a road, even if we expect mappers to be more specific than that. But if the wiki is to be believed, it doesn’t literally mean a road; it could be a path instead.
highway=motorcycleway would coin a brand-new word that doesn’t exist in English, “motorcycleway”, to refer to a kind of path, by analogy with cycleway.
highway=pathless is an adjective, yet it doesn’t refer to a kind of highway. There’s no such thing as “a pathless”, and it isn’t a pathless road or street. A “pathless path”? That’s an oxymoron! No, it’s a pathless… something. In other words, it’s a not-a-path, a not:highway=path – or even a no:highway=path based on verifiability.
This would be far from the first time OSM keywords depart from standard English, but I think anyone who wants to promote further departures should tread with caution. What appears to be a mere linguistic quirk today might turn out to be a real headache for mappers and software developers in the future.
@alan_gr and @Woazboat, you both make good points about the impracticality of collecting detailed granular information to tag smoothness, trail_visibility, incline, width, etc. while on a long backcountry trip. I wonder how you would feel about classifying a trail as one of several types if we had a tag similar to tracktype but for trails/paths? Would it feel more feasible due to being more general and less granular, or would it not really feel much different? I know there are plenty of people who will say tracktype is a bad tag because it’s too subjective. However, I find it a useful middle ground to give a general idea of road quality when I’m not able to collect all the various granular attributes that could ideally be tagged.
Exactly, and that’s why you can’t expect new users to tag a 1-meter wide motorized way giving access to residences as highway=residential + motorcar=no + motorcycle=yes. This is why many use the controversial service=alley which was initially meant for something else. An alternative service=utilities and a separate highway=alley in the first place would have probably prevented this longstanding issue.
There are plenty of other common keywords that probably could have made their way to highway too, like trail, avenue, boulevard, or towpath as you mentioned in another discussion.
I’m not very sure about that hypothetical. At least in some languages and dialects, both cases have the same identity – alley – so maybe we would’ve instead been griping about ways dual-tagged as both highway=alley and service=utility simultaneously. On the bright side, it would’ve been more consistent with the use of service=* on railways.
Yes, you heard right: an alley can be a cramped passage for motorbikes, or it can be a broad, one-lane road for giant garbage trucks. If I had to distinguish between the two in my dialect, I would describe the former as a “back alley” – even though the latter is more likely to serve the rear of each abutting property. But apparently it’s the reverse in British English? If the two really have separate identities in English, we would have two different service=* values by now.
I would be OK with that in principle, but I’m not sure if this is sufficiently distinct from the existing sac_scale, which I do try to tag wherever relevant. Note that I rarely go above the “mountain hiking” level, so I’m not speaking for people who do Alpine hikes.
A key difference is that highway=track is by definition already limited to a fairly specialised subset of all roads. So it makes sense to treat a missing tracktype on that subset as “not surveyed” or “undefined”, and encourage mappers to add tracktype to all tracks. Mappers who want to tag this can do so systematically if they wish, by surveying tracks without the tag. Mappers of service roads, residential roads and so on never even have to think about this tag.
For an equivalent for trails, let’s call it trail_type, we come back yet again to issues arising from the very wide coverage of highway=path (which could be even wider if we discourage highway=footway in favour of path plus subtags, as the original highway=path proposal wanted, and as some people still suggest).
Would a highway=path without trail_type mean “this is not a hiking trail or anything similar, it’s a regular path intended for everyone to walk and maybe cycle on”? That suffers from the problem that you can never be sure if a way without this tag has already been surveyed, so mappers who want to systematically add this tag will tend to end up repeatedly checking the same paths.
Or does it mean “not yet surveyed” - implying that everyone who maps any kind of urban path has to explicitly confirm it’s not a trail?
I agree in general, but highway=motorcycleway in particular seems like a reasonable name to me. There doesn’t seem to be a word for this in standard English, probably because the concept itself is not prominent in most (any?) English-speaking countries. I can say for sure there is nothing like this in Ireland. So a word that doesn’t exist but has a reasonably intuitive meaning seems OK for a tag.
First I’d like to extend some praise to you for being to my knowledge the first to try and clarify semantics that way. So far I was under the impression that this kind of approach was considered “not for OSM” for some unknown reason.
Then… if we say that “highway=” means “this is about highways and stuff”, maybe an option for us would be to create a key that says “this is about outdoors and stuff”. I dont like the idea much but maybe it would provide a way forward. During a long transition period we would have “highway=path” and “outdoors=path” indifferently used for dirt trails but over time this would resolve into two universes.
Well, the SAC scale represents certain qualities of terrain on which the path is situated, like the roughness, whether the path is secured, whether the use of hands is necessary to progress. It does not say anything about whether the path is visible on the ground or not.
Specifically Pathless would be Class 1 in that Forestry guide. It’s great that these exist documented somewhere because in Europe it seems that such things almost don’t exist or at least they don’t have a place in OSM.
Maybe we are also trying to bite too much and should try to focus on specifics, instead. I’ve posted links to photographs of a certain pathless terrain where there is a specific route that can be used to go from peak A to peak B. About 90+% of the terrain in between are cliffs and extremely dangerous for hikers. This one route, with cairns at certain sections, and a narrow passable grass patch in between the cliffs should have a name, since it is not accepted as a Path.
What is the name?
(although I’m quoting Alan, the question is for everyone)
For me the fact that you repeatedly use the word “route” here and elsewhere is a hint that the tagging could use that word. It’s also already in use on ways for route=ferry which is similar in a way (it can only be observed when a ferry is using it), and I think for route=piste and route=ski.
A possible objection to route is that its use for a certain type of way could be too easily confused with its use on route=hiking and route=foot relations. Another objection is that visible paths are also routes, whereas your question is specific to routes that are not paths. Hmm, maybe I have talked myself out of my own suggestion…
Yes, that probably deserves some clarification. I use the word “route” for lack of a better one. I’d probably use path or way, if they didn’t already have a different context within OSM. Route, for me, means a hiking route. The thing that is currently mapped as a relation (omg, what a spaghetti of terms) and may include multiple paths, roads, and whatever else.
Edit: Well, ok, that’s something, too. A route could be defined instead but it would need to include a section of terrain that has no paths on it. How to do that?
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but we had a rather long and fruitful discussion about introducing foot_scale, which resulted in this Wiki draft proposal. However, it’s currently rather stale, since @Erutan seems to be short of time lately…
I like the foot_scale. It doesn’t solve the path ambiguity, but it helps data users create better display, better itineraries and perhaps warning logo’s and warning messages when a footscale value is tagged.
PS And it can be used on other highway types as well.
I was aware and indeed contributed some suggestions and photos at an early stage. Then I got busy with other things and lost track - it looks like it got further towards a coherent proposal than I realised. I would probably use this tag. I like the fact that “casual” can sensibly be applied, for examples, to easy paths around a visitor centre car park aimed at the entire public. That in turn allows us to identify where those paths transition to “attentive” - it would be clear that the mapper intended to make that distinction, which can’t really be done with sac_scale.