The riders call it a piste. This is in a resort. Created purely to provide leisurely fun. Paid for by cable car tickets. Foot not allowed there. Bicycle one-way only. Not part of a traffic network. Sample picture:
Often found as highway=cycleway. I find this not correct. This does not belong under the highway key at all. I flirt with leisure=track, I am not alone, yet consumer support is not there, so this will be cycleway forever? Any ideas?
I also support moving dedicated trails (as they are sometimes called in Germany) to track with the associated sport tags.
Some of these are already tagged as tracks in my region. We should talk about changing the tagging and changing the wiki in this regard
In my area these are tagged with highway=path, access=no, bicycle=yes, oneway=yes, and I think that fits it pretty good.
Most of them are however connected to the outside network in some way. And although it’s easier to go up by cable car, you can also ride up to the starting point yourself and use the trail for free.
Do you have an example for a “closed resort”?
I mark segments as ways tagged highway=path + surface + mtb:scale + incline + smoothness + foot=no + mtb=designated + oneway=yes etc.
For the whole “piste”, I create relation with type=route + route=mtb and other associated tags, and put ways mentioned above that are part of it into that relation.
It seems to show just fine on cycling-specific maps for me.
Not in the US, at least the parts that I have mountain biked in (Western US).
In a lot of cases you can bike to the top of the mountain or take the lift, so these are arguably part of the larger network or roads and trails. For example, you could ride from your house on a public road, to the parking lot of the downhill mtb area, decide not to take the lift, ride up a trail that allows uphill traffic, and only then ride down the downhill only trail.
I agree.
I agree with you, but I think some data consumers think that access=no overrides all other access tags… but that is a subject for another thread.
I think this works too, but might want to add horse=no
I’m not sure about British English, but in American English this is called a mountain bike trail. Specifically it may be called a downhill mountain bike trail to differentiate from a cross country mountain bike trail. Colloquially, mountain bikers call them both simply trails. The word piste means a snow covered ski run. It isn’t used to refer to mountain bike trails or any other kind of trail.
I agree that highway=cycleway is a bit misleading for this sort of feature, though it is at least more specific than highway=path. Improving the situation is tricky though. A new tag intended to be used only for downhill mountain bike trails would end up being used for cross country mountain bike trails as well since they are thought of as two sub-types of mountain bike trails, not as two entirely separate things. There are also plenty of mountain bike trails that don’t fall neatly into the downhill or cross country category and are instead a bit of both. So there could be a new tag for mountain bike trails overall, but then we have to contend with the many many mixed use trails used for mountain biking but also hiking and other activities. It’s not a simple problem 
.
I no longer map these as hw=path but use leisure=track. The purpose is not commuting (getting from A to B) but sports. Similarly, cross-country skiing routes are not tagged using the highway-scheme.
Well, a rider called it a Piste (capital P, we talked in German). The operator calls them trails like you do. Maybe that comes from, because the UCI also calles them pistes, maybe it comes from that the operator of the cable car in Winter operates downhill pistes, those with snow cover – Their business just repeats in Summer. (Personally, I do not think that will scale when climate change makes Winter the off-season.)
Most use the cable car, especially with the downhill bikes, the extra sturdy ones that even lack the gear to go uphill; The so-called enduro have that gear, and highly likely an electric motor too. The operators of the resort tolerate that, a bit like the so-called piste-ski-touring people.
Is “must be used for commuting” part of the definition of the highway key?
There are many trails in national parks, gardens, etc, that exist only for hiking/leisure rather than commuting. Perhaps the difference is that hiking isn’t a “sport”?
Seems like the German word Piste has a broader meaning than the English word does. The English word piste is borrowed from the French word piste which also has a broad meaning, but only a narrow slice of meaning came through to English. We only use it in relation to skiing and fencing for some reason . Anyway, apologies for the tangential language discussion. Carry on.
did you know that the French “piste” means “track?” Nothing is ever simple 
My understanding: Highway creates a routable way for human traffic and transportation. Shipping stuff, running errands, you name it.
Lots of trails in the wilderness have roots in above meaning of the word highway. Another big lot of trails (at least in my location) where created to make it easy to explore the area, to get to places with great view, etc.
The trails in my opening post are artificially built to perform a certain kind of sports. They are single-use, so I think “path” is not much of a concern here, unless somebody thinks a path is just a mediocre cycleway with less improved surface, which has something to it, I concur.
I guess that would make you a freerider then, in many of the meanings of that term 
PS: Here the so-called piste-ski-tourers pay with the ticket for the parking lot, that the ones that take the lift get reimbursed.
To me, the wiki entry of leisure=track (“A dedicated track for running, cycling and other non-motorised racing …”) makes this seem the appropriate tag for this purpose, I agree with that.
One could take issue with the word “racing”, mentioned at several places in the wiki, e.g. also in Key:leisure (and consistently in several languages) – which maybe does not apply for every MTB trail (or “-Piste”), if not just very few of them are actual race tracks.
However, I think that “racing” helps to distinguish an MTB trail (or “Piste”) that exclusively serves for mounainbiking as leisure activity from a path that has other purposes (as the wiki states: “For instance: a path that in a forest with a mountainbiking route on it, is still a highway=path.”) and “racing” could be interpreted quite loosely. What exactly is a “race” after all, and is it sufficient that one could (legally or de facto) race on the trail?
My first idea actually was highway=raceway, but this (for reasons not immediately obvious to me, but so be it) is agreed to be reserved for motorised racing only.
Can those of you advocating for the use of leisure=track explain how this:
Is the same thing as this?
To me they are very different feature types and I don’t see how they belong under the same top level tag.
You could probably make the same case for (say) highway=tertiary around the world. I’ve argued the same for horse gallops maybe 15 years ago (where I am right now they’re a very distinct thing - not in OSM terms highway=bridleway or anything else), but ultimately other OSM tags (sport, surface, smoothness…) can be used to separate them.
With a data consumer hat on I do show horse gallops with a distinctive rendering, and someone could do the same with these downhill mountain bike things.
leisure=track
colour=red
But yes, I see your point.
still:
sport=*
surface=*
smoothness=*
incline=*
access=*
...
just like, e.g., a formula-1 and a motocross raceway are quite different.
Well, the curves are both made so people can go full speed. Of course that holds for the Autobahn too, so perhaps the upper image of yours perhaps rather highway=footway?
Indeed, the scheme from downhill skiing pistes is also applied to these top-post mtb downhill races, red means intermediate here, blue means easy and black means hard, btw.
To make matters complete, the same skiing colour scheme is also used here for (mountain-) hiking trails and ordinary uphill mtb tracks, the latter mostly dual use, forestry and leisure. The openstreetmap six or seven grades schemes will never catch on here with the local operators and administration. Even the riders of the downhill pistes that I talked to do not know them.
Please check the list of sport=*-tags mentioned on Tag:leisure=track - OpenStreetMap Wiki
leisure=track can obviously vary wildly in terms of physical appearance, a bobsleigh track also has - with respect to material, surface, smoothness etc. - very little in common with your posted image. The common characterics is the dedicated man-made structure used for racing (as others pointed out earlier)