Thailand’s National Parks maintain a variety of foot-only trails leading to waterfalls, viewpoints, and other attractions. These range from concrete paths with stairs to compacted dirt or rough terrain with rope-assisted sections. Access requires an entrance fee, and parks are managed by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP).
Trails within National Parks are typically signed and named. However, external trails may connect to them, so proper tagging helps prevent routing hikers through unofficial access points. While some mappers previously used highway=footway, renderers now often treat path and footway interchangeably.
With respect to path vs footway, that seems to be regional as far as which is preferred. I had issues with that when creating my hiking maps a few years back. I decided that footway was slightly more likely to be a smooth walkway while path was slightly more likely to be a hiking trail. But that in both cases “slightly” was the operative word and I needed to look at other tags like surface, width, SAC scale, etc. to make my decision. See Displaying distance between trail junctions (Part 2) – (re)Tired Tech(ie)
Access is for legal restrictions. At least in my are those are generally signed but I can imagine places where that might not be true. Basically, if horse travel is illegal, then horse=no should be tagged, etc.
Thanks! I’ve realized that informal=no isn’t necessary when operator=* is specified. As for access, I’ll check whether the national park policy explicitly mentions prohibited vehicles.
Just curious—does this mean that any trail without an operator should be tagged as informal=yes, essentially marking it as a social trail? In Thailand, most forest trails are public and created by local farmers, hunters, and foragers.
Yes, that’s definitely the right approach—adding more descriptive tags, especially surface. I remember that a few years ago, some renderers (Maps.me, perhaps?) would display highway=footway as paved if no surface tag was present.
In theory these two things are mutually exclusive, but it is unlikely that this can be perfectly reflected in OSM. A trail created by and/or looked after by a person or group of people (has an operator) is not informal, while a trail lacking such stewardship is informal. The line between these two states can be a bit blurry though. It doesn’t make sense to tag every trail stewarded by an individual local farmer as operator={Farmer's Name} and the information is unlikely to be easily obtainable or verifiable anyway. Even if it were, this would probably fall under the limitations on mapping private information. So the lack of an operator tag on such trails does not necessarily mean they should automatically get an informal=yes tag.
Where I am**, most things that you would call a “trail” have no operator and are not informal. Somebody (a private individual or a larger public or non-public body) will own the land it runs over; there may (or may not) be some legal requirements that they have to follow to keep it in a certain state and it’s extremely unlikely that they themselves created it.
Land in National Parks here is still mostly privately owned. In some cases the national park authority might own the land - I guess that would be closer to the US case, and some other countries may have land management models close to that. Much more will be owned by charities (e.g. the National Trust), water authorities and private individuals.
If something is an “obviously public (FSVO) path” I wouldn’t tag it as informal, even if it doesn’t have an operator as such, other than the actual path users patching it up to keep it usable. If someone’s tried to bushwhack a shortcut then I absolutely would.
I think we are saying essentially the same thing here. There are plenty of trails that can be considered “formal” (not eligible for informal=yes) for a variety of reasons and that also don’t make sense to tag with an operator. I was trying to say that even these trails probably have some person or people who look after them but it doesn’t make sense to tag this as an operator because it could be just a private individual’s name (not necessarily the property owner) or something vague like “various local trail maintenance enthusiasts”.
I actually found out that the operator has a wikipedia page, so the easiest for data consumers is just to reference it, then no need to worry about languages, typos and different variation of names:
operator:wikidata=Q5260416
Just wondering—since the trails are only accessible after paying an entrance fee, shouldn’t this be reflected in the access tags? For example, highway=footway/path + foot=customers/permit + bicycle=no + horse=no.
Ok so what tag should I use to prevent hikers from being routed through the back of a national park where entrance fees are only collected at the main entry point?
In my area the entrance fees for national, state, or county parks, are on vehicles, not on individuals. So walking in or through a park on official trails but bypassing the entrance fee location, is perfectly acceptable and nothing needs to be tagged to prevent hikers from being routed through the back of the park…
On the other hand, in sensitive habitat areas that are popular many of those same parks require a permit for each group and often the group size is limited. Those permits, though usually issued at no cost, are required for some trails or areas. For those cases the trails can be tagged with something like access=permit
Visitors must purchase tickets for both individuals AND vehicles at a single entry point to access park amenities and maintained trails during opening hours. Entry without a ticket or outside these hours is considered trespassing.
Likewise, access to a select few national park trails with overnight camping requires a special, higher-cost permit that must be requested several days in advance. So, using access = permit would work well for these cases. But what about the on-the-spot single-point-of-entry visitor tickets? access=customers ?
It seems like the idea is that fee=yes means you have to pay a fee to use this thing directly, while access=customers is a more vague sense of “being a customer” whether a direct fee is payed for access or not. A store with free parking but a sign stating “customer parking only” doesn’t require you to pay a fee for the parking. Instead it requires that you are there with the intent to buy something from the store and you can’t park there for some other purpose. On the other hand, a public parking lot may allow parking by anyone for any purpose, but a direct fee is charged for the parking specifically. It’s a bit weird that one tag is under the access schema and the other is not, but it kind of makes sense too. The distinction certainly gets blurry when talking about places with paid ticketed entry since paying a fee and being a customer are basically synonymous.
Anyway, extending this distinction to trail systems…
I’d think that access=customers could make sense for a hotel or resort where customers are paying guests staying there for several days and on the premises there are trails they can use while there. The general public are not allowed to use the trails. Resort guests (customers) don’t have to pay a trail fee to use the trails specifically because they have already paid to stay at the resort. So access=customers would make sense.
fee=yes makes sense for a trail system where anyone can just show up, pay the fee, and then use the trails. Ideally a router should consume fee=yes and show a warning to users where a fee is required and allow them to avoid such trails if they wish. I don’t know if any pedestrian routers do this, but many car routers have an “avoid toll roads” option. Of course for that the tag is toll=yes, but I digress…
If I can enter the area without passing an entrance where I need to pay a fee, how should I pay that fee? So based on ground truth it seems to be fine to get in there without paying. You just need to pay when you pass certain check points.
If you need to buy a permit and park rangers check that permit randomly within the park, you might want to add the access on each way within the park.
Will there be checks within the park whether I have a ticked or will this only be checked at certain check points?
If there are no checks in the area and not every entrance has a check point then I don’t see a reason to put access restrictions on al the ways within the area and it’s rather a access restriction at those check points.
For example in the US, you usually have check points at the main road entrances, but not on back country access roads or smaller parks. Still you need to get a ticket (self service) and park rangers might check for it.
But I also know also attractions that they only charge where the tourist ge directed to, but back site access (used by locals) don’t charge and you can walk around freely.
