What do the tagging experts say – not that I would not consider myself an expert too:
Falls possibly fatal, is that in line with demanding_mountain_hiking?
I ask, because lately the news reported some fatalities due to deep falls on what in openstreetmap is tagged as above. And also because I got a personal message on some grading of mine respective potentially deep yet unlikely lethal falls that I did not take into account.
I don’t see how a fatal fall per se should factor into a SAC scale score. You can trip and fall on anything.
Shall we put a sac_scale on this sidewalk?
Exposure and danger of falling is one aspect of sac_scale, but it’s only one of them and just because that’s a possibility doesn’t mean it’s automatically a high difficulty.
It’s always hard to judge trail difficulty from afar and pretty impossible to say without any details like here. Exposed terrain and T3 / demanding_mountain_hiking are generally not mutually exclusive though.
I used to work in occupational health and safety. I’ve seen falls on level ground result in fatalities to healthy able-bodied workers and 10 meter or larger verticall falls result in only moderate injuries. I don’t think it’s a good classification method.
The poster child for this is likely Way: 37571835 | OpenStreetMap there is no technical difficulty associated with simply walking up the mountain, but you are quite exposed.
Resulting in ~1 death per year (of roughly ~40’000 people walking up the path), so is demanding_mountain_hiking justified or not?
Looking here Grosser Mythen Wanderung - grandiose Aussicht auf 5 Seen the classification is from an official body? Yet, happening to slip under one of the guard rails will send you down much more than 10 meters. In the news that I mentioned, one person fell 150 meters and the other fell 370 meters according to media. No problem at the Mythen I guess to top that.
Falls are possibly fatal on well paved sidewalks in city center, that have no traps/obstacles or even steps and rubbish.
It’s a well known statistic in Switzerland that the T2 and T3 difficulties produce by far the most fall victims. There’s more people traveling on them than on the T4+ ones, and they pay less attention and they’re less prepared. The government has awareness campaigns about the risk of those paths every year: https://www.sicher-bergwandern.ch/
But those are still strictly taken paths of that difficulty, so I don’t think we should upgrade them to a higher difficulty just because they’re extremely popular with insufficiently prepared hikers like the above quoted “Grosser Mythen” path.
Certainly, the ratio is a determining factor. 1 in 40,000 or one in 40,000,000 does make a difference. Yet, I’d say to how far the fall, 15cm or 150m will make a difference in result. Something that might be objective?
From what I know, SAC scale only accounts for that as a mental difficulty. So Grosser Mythen with all the railings really a T3?
When I started the topic, two issues on mind: That paths tagged T3 (demanding_mountain_hiking in OSM terms) generate fatal falls (up to 370m) and the OSM notice that said, I did not take the possibility of deep falls into account when grading a path mountain_hiking.
Perhaps I am also overestimating what sac_scale tagging can achieve in the real world. If their app/map even shows that information, most people just will not be able to make sense of it.
Relatedly,
If some hiking/mountaineering/alpine route has wikidata=* entry, you can specify P1120: number of deaths with P585: point in time qualifier.
(And if it doesn’t have wikidata yet, one can create it…)
That should at least keep data clear and verifiable.
P1120 is constrained to only appear on items about individual events. Unless that changes so that the property can be used more like visitors per year (P1174) or or annual average daily traffic (P8753), I guess the more technically correct approach would be a significant event (P793) of accidental death (Q21142718) qualified by quantity (P1114).