How to tag a forest maintenance trail?

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1

I’ve recorded a GPX track on a trail that is almost only used for forest maintenance.

Now I’m wondering how I should tag it on OSM. I plan to tag that this trail is inofficial, has some obstacle and is not well visible.

Doing so, it will be rendered just like any hiking trail on the rendering apps (Komoot, Organic Map). This would be probably annoying for most hikers as they will not see on the map that this is not a recommended trail.

Would it be tolerated to mark it as alpine trail (T4 here in Switzerland) so that it gets rendered differently and doesn’t confuse the hikers? I’ve seen this approach being used a few times.

Here a photo of such a trail, there are sometimes some marks indicating the trail

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image1331×998 205 KB

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2

As frustrating as it is, you should not alter the data so that it fits a certain data consumer. Not sure how many even use that trail or if it’s more a game trail (I’d guess that forest service would usually leave behind machine tracks). If you think no one really useses it anymore (besides animals) you could tag it as disused:highway=path. It wouldn’t appear on most apps then.

I think we need more people sending those commercial app developers emails and asking/demanding them to finally render important tags in their styles, like trail_visibility/informal.

Leaving out important tags is actually quite an issue for nature conservation as well.

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3

Thanks for the advice, I’ll do it in that way and tag it correctly.

4

In other cases man_made=cutline might fit.

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5

If you’re not familiar, check out the OSM US trails initiative : Trails Stewardship Initiative | OpenStreetMap US which is working with app makers to make these data visible. I’m pretty sure that AllTrails and GaiaGPS currently do better rendering to discourage use of informal trails, at least.

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