In Hawaii and other US states that have public beaches, there are often marked paths to the beach that go between private property. These paths are marked by the state and are public right of ways. Many of them do NOT have any any amenities. They are simply a small path from the side of the road to the beach. Here is an example of a path marked by the yellow sign and blue sign.
Any suggestions on how to map these?
We have these in Rhode Island, they’re called Shoreline Public Access. highway=path + access=public are always appropriate here. Definitely interested to learn if anyone has other tagging to add to these cases.
You could tag as highway=footway and then footway=link or footway=path (whichever seems more appropriate).
If bikes can/commonly use these paths too, add bicycle=yes.
footway=link is for footways that don’t actually exist – they’re used for routing purposes to indicate things like “you can cross from the sidewalk to the parking aisle” or “the sidewalk ends; now you need to walk along the side of the road”.
surface=grass / sand etc
Are then there steps going down to the beach?
Thanks for the help. I’m maily wondering about mapping these locations. Almost like tagging highway=trailhead, but for a beach access. Or is tagging the path enough? Many of these trails are a only few hundred feet and end on the beach.
In that case, you’d want to identify the ID that the state refers to the signs by and tag the signs themselves with traffic_sign=US-HI:abc123.
In addition to the path, of course.
Yes, that should be enough to direct people down to the beach.
Thanks all. Does anyone think mapping the signs as nodes is much of a benefit? The government data I found looks like it would be pretty easy to import and verify from street level imagery.
Is the data under an allowable licence &/or do we have permission to use it?
Verifying from street level imagery is fine, as long as it’s Mapillary or Bing, not Google or Apple!
My answer above (mapping the traffic sign nodes) was presuming you already had some kind of use for the data in mind. If you can’t think of any reason to record where each sign is, (e.g. to make a map highlighting all such beach accesses) then you can skip it 
Should be access=yes (although access being allowed is the default and not really necessary). A blanket access=yes is often incorrect since that technically also includes cars, etc…
Thanks for the input. I came across a couple tagged as tourism=attraction and it got me curious. Done with this rabbit hole. :-D