This small, hand pulled dock/ferry is part of an official hiking trail. Used for pedestrian crossing of a river. How should such a way be tagged?
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As a ferry, with access tags and opening hours?
Do you mind explaining how it works for me? I can’t see a rope for pulling it above and on the other side. Is it released by tension in the opposite direction, or the role has dipped into water? These visible ones seem to be for docking?
- Operation: Although the minority of
ford=boatis obviously bad and unacceptable,route=ferryalone doesn’t specify it’s operated by yourself. In general, maybeself_service=onlycan added to clarify this. - Mechanism: There’s
ferry:cable=, but it was documented in 2016 as “de facto” when used to only over 30 instances. To be precise, these “cable” are only the guidance, and traction. It doesn’t cover the propulsion for whether it is hand-pulled, powered on boat, hauled from shore, or relying on the force of reaction from water current.
I have created an imagined list of personal ideas for working mechanisms of rail-based transit before. It could be applicable to ferries with traction=cable + propulsion=human (example, someone mentioned they have a use for =horse in horse carriages and streetcars), but this doesn’t differentiate whether the source of motive power is on-board, or fixed on land. I would need to generalize linear_motor:primary (for the powered primary side coil of the linear motor arrangement) to all methods of propulsion.
On top of the above, it’s important to add fee=no / toll=no (that’s another topic for debate)
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I think it is operated with the white rope. You just pull on the rope that is running above the platform (through the ring).
The rope streches over to the other side and then back again to the “ferry”, that way creating a loop to which the “ferry” is attached.
Maybe the chains are for docking, but actually you do not want to attach it on one side, because you have to be able to operate it from the other shore as well - although this seems difficult without wet feet…
That’s a good description of the operation! The chain was temporary “docking”. It is indeed not inteded to be tied to shore at all, to facilitate fetching it from the other side.
I ended up tagging it as a ferry route with self_service=only, toll=no and a description that it is hand pulled.
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Adding note linking back this thread may be also useful 
Especially as there is a photo here.
Here’s a picture of a different one, where the mechanism can be seen:
It’s locally called the “pontoon crossing” and tagged as just a route=ferry with an amenity=ferry_terminal on either side (which has the disadvantage of making it appear at far too low a zoom level on some maps).
Wikipedia has an article about cable ferries, it also mentions some examples of hand-pulled ones. Here’s one, here’s another one. Neither of them currently has any tags that say what kind of ferry it is.