Hello! I’ve discovered that in Fruska gora national park in Serbia there are a lot of paths marked as path, but some of them are “normal” paths, like described in osm wiki, and some are barely noticeable and hard to pass, actually I would call them just forest. And dangerous forest, because or deep ravines with slope up to 45 deg. How should such paths be tagged to distinguish them from “normal” paths?
Have a look at surface, sac_scale, trail_visibility, these are my go-to tags for nearly every path I’ve walked. Some more niche tags that could be interesting for you are width and obstacle=vegetation.
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Thank you!
It sounds like Tag:informal=yes - OpenStreetMap Wiki may also be applicable.
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For the record, I’m actively maintaining (and regularly surveying) hiking paths on Fruška gora. Of course, I cannot vouch for each and every path out there (many have been populated based on 20+ year old traces and hiking maps), and some are indeed overgrown, or have never really existed. And new ones pop up from time to time, since numerous trail running and mtb events are hosted on the mountain.
Still, visual comparison against the Strava heatmap shows a pretty good matching overall (use Shift+H to toggle the heatmap):
https://www.freemap.sk/#map=13/45.163755/19.849720&layers=Xs0
However, I’d prefer the map better cleaned up against dangerous, overgrown or downright non-existing trails. Many are harmless, in the sense that nobody would plan a route over a “longcut” connecting a ridge and ravine. Still, there are some that look like potentially attractive connections but in reality it’s all bushes and blackberries. Some of the “suspicious” paths were mistagged as highway=footway so that they render differently – those are probably the candidates for deletion.
So, if you do field survey, you are encouraged to wholesale delete the non-existing paths, and at minimum set trail_visibility=bad for those that are “barely visible”. I would appreciate if you leave a map note whenever you are not sure.
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