I am not aware of single-use trail-running tracks. They might exist in some resorts? Single-use one-way no-foot MTB downhill tracks do exist. That for I used the clause “In case” in my suggestion.
I am just here to make sure, the global solution will not run too much contrary to what I locally observe and something usefully applicable comes out of that talk, if ever.
You really deserve a medal.
Good point. There is no difference between a motorway, a primary, secondary, nth type of road. It’s all about laws and speed limits, and direction the cars are moving. Why bother tagging the main tag when a line with 150 additional descriptions will work?
The same goes for any type of water or ground or air. There’s enough secondary tags to describe their molecular structure, if needed.
The only difference between residential…primary is the relative importance. trunk and motorway are different to the rest, though the difference is globally the same. Overall comparable to path vs. via_ferrata.
I’m talking about the mapper-perspective. You pick highway=path and add secondary tags as you think is necessary. If I’m not familiar with hiking, I don’t need to judge the suitability for hiking. With the pathway-concept I need to do be able to do this. If people not familiar with hiking judge a way by hiking criteria this will end up in a mess. The result is kind of random. Normal tourists might scramble where hiker just walk along.
highway=path can be “everything” and therefore might end up in a mess for the data-users, who only evaluate highway=*. But that’s not a mess. If I only evaluate boundary=* it will be a mess as well. 
It would make sense to include path((way)=unknown for the usecase when the precise type of path is not known. Kind of what highway=path is now :-D.
Ang again, I think your troubles are imaginary. People who do not hike would probably not get into scrambling teritory - you usually need to hike to do that. Nobody also says that highway=trail should be defined by the fact that people hike on it. It should be more about physical characteristics.
Of course they get there. Driving with there car to the trailhead and have an hour hike. I myself count me in that category. I’m not a hiker, though I go out into nature and occasionally go on a hike in a national park. I think it’s kind of obvious, that for me scramble starts much earlier, simply because my self-confidence is lower in that regards. pathway will bring me now into the position, to judge what that way might be. is it still a trail or already scramble. with highway=path I don’t need to worry about it and leave the sac_scale for someone with more hiking experience.
On the other hand, I hiked trails, which have been totally muddy due to heavy rain and I needed to scramble. Though in dry condition it would have been an easy trail.
Then you might want to make this more clear. I got shared_use is only paved. How about same way but compacted or fine_gravel?
What are the physical differences between trail, scramble and singletrack. In your opening post, one is described as “for hiking” the other for “mtb sports”.
Should this be a singletrack or a trail or a highway=bridleway?
Then it might be better to leave highway=path as is and add a path=* with your suggested values and everyone can add them, if he feels comfortable to do so.
In such cases I always compare it to roads and it turns out simple.
So, it is no different than people not familiar with driving (me?) deciding between a service, residential, tertiary, track roads.
If one is not sure, they can leave some default (path?) that best matches what they are mapping, as per wiki, and just like for any other element (lake, fountain, house). Someone more knowledgeable can adjust it later. But, as it stands now, it would stay path forever, even if it isn’t one.
Edit: Lately I’ve been adjusting some climbing routes and via ferratas that are simply added as paths, for a lack of better options. Even now, when via_ferrata is an official tag, not many know about it, it seems. And that makes sense. How would anyone know about new tags, unless they visit at least the wiki regularly? And not many do, I’m sure.
While this might be true (tourists might need to scramble in the middle of a city if they had too much to drink), scramble is a place where 99.9% of people have to use hands. You can check the photos in the “documenting problems” thread. The T6 path requires hands, unless you can fly.
And, amazingly, if I drive from a residential road onto a highway, I don’t have to change anything, yet it is a separate tag.
Correct. And nothing changes there. I actually support leaving highway=path for something narrower than the track road. Practically, one strip of the track road. It is as good default as any other.
Now, if not sure, you could still use whatever it seems closest to and leave it at that. Eventually check the wiki for possible options.
Yes, and this is exactly how difficulty gradation works. The SAC Scale, one of the better-known difficulty grading systems, grades path in their ideal conditions. Simply, who can tell what the worse conditions are? Imagine there’s 5m of snow on the path.
So, one thing that needs to be clear is that the difficulty is always marked in ideal conditions, hence the best-case scenario.
I agree that you have a point here. It is a weird mish-mash of conditions. But, somehow that worked for humanity for a long time and I’m sure it will continue to work.
I would even propose that we only establish the principle or the way to separate these - i.e. by using path=* or pathway=* - and then we work on what the exact values we would start with. Later we should work on other ones, after they are identified. And also eventually decide what a certain type is, or is not. And add all this into the wiki.
We should not wait until everything is clearly defined. I don’t think that would ever happen.
A few cases will clearly pop-out right from the start. Let’s say we define only those three as the valid values to go ahead with - trail, scramble, and singletrack. We could discuss each one separately, come to some sort of agreement and document it in the wiki.
Just like roads, singletrack can be extremely dangerous should one decide to hike up on it. They could soon be unpleasantly surprised by an incoming MTB, speeding down the hill.
Scramble would, in the same way, be pretty obvious. Photos are readily available. There’s quite a few people here who regularly visit such areas. I’m sure it will be clear to many that it is difficult to confuse scramble with a regular trail.
And trail will be clearly identifiable from the other two, both by its physical characteristics and the main purpose. Trails in most of the world are used simply as means of getting from A to B, they are the easiest way to pass the terrain, using the mode of transport that exists there (foot and cattle, usually). When people get to a standard that they can buy everything in a supermarket, then they use these trails to go “walking in nature”, apparently. More advanced societies put colours and shields and signposts along the routes, as well.
I think that’s a valid proposal. Further, once you define something that seems like a valid solution to these problems, I would suggest that you add it to the first post in the “documenting solutions” thread. Hopefully, later we can focus the discussion just on the solutions proposed and polish them further.
From presets. It might be time for a highway=via_ferrata preset in popular editors, so someone can type “via ferrata” into iD and it comes up as an option.
Interestingly, when the tag was first proposed, highway=via_ferrata was controversial because some people thought it should just be mapped as highway=path. A few years on, highway=via_ferrata seems to have “won”, and if I understand correctly, even @aighes (the most vocal defender of highway=path in this thread) supports it.
I agree. The boundary between the two may be a bit fuzzy, but so is the boundary between unclassified and residential or the boundary between bar, pub, restaurant, cafe and fast_food. That’s not a reason to tag them all as amenity=hospitality_establishment and rely on other tags to convey the difference between them.
Oh yeah, sure in general. I am just questioning the usefulness of this one, or more
Again, then explicitly having path=unknown which explicitly assumes nothing (besides no cars) is a lot better than having highway=path which in practice means a lot of (wrong) assumptions on the side of renderers. And anyway, so maybe you fall low on the scale of ability to walk in uneven terrain but that is not a problem. Maybe you would tag somthing as a scramble which most people would still think is a path. Not much harm done then; either the people after you would correct it or it would indeed be (an easy scramble). The possibility of misclasifying at the grey border areas is not a problem, anything in actual existence has this problem :-).
No, above, I kind of rely on the wikipedia article to define share_use. However, it is by no means only paved. surface=compacted would also work. It needs to be constructed, yes, and allow easy use by common bikes.
I am not saying it should only be about physical characteristics. However, for scrambles, the physical characteristics that the trail (something that was created by people walking) is mostly not there, plus you use your hands. Single_track (have you ever seen one?) are quite distinct, the turns are usually made sloping to counter the centrifugal (centripetal? I am never sure) force, which is quite uncomfortable for walking, etc. They are made for biking, not walking. Usually also by far not the most logical way for a walker to go up or down.
Definitely a trail. Not a single_track by definition of shared use, not a bridleway as it does not seem to be designated primarily for horses (thogh I still struggle to understand if bridleway physically differs from trail, I suspect not).
That does not really solve the problem of sending people to dangerous terrain because subtype of path was not added. The breakage here would be a feature!
Anyway, I am not sure what is your purpose here:
Are you more saying that
I am about a loss why via_ferrata keeps coming up here so often. From what I know, via_ferrata is in highway key-space for simply one reason: So that it cannot be doubly tagged with highway=path. Certainly not because of its importance in human traffic network.
Via ferrata clearly is wrong in highway key space, these features are not for traffic, they exist pureley for leisure. If I were asked, the via ferratas would perfectly be tagged leisure=track;sport=via_ferrata, thus giving me the option, so I could double tag highway=path|pathway=* on those that I and lots of others can do without the kit. But oh my, highway=path will make them available to all routers. For some routers its even enough to make them highway=*.
Perhaps pathway=* might change that? We just have to be very clever in naming the values of that key!
I am saying,
highway, eg. highway=scramble.access, like “not intended for cars” (if local laws limit the access further, local defaults might be helpful)That’s all you need in my understanding to have a more useful classification for general purpose map. The question of how difficult the trail is, horse_scale, sac_scale and mtb:scale will answer.
Using highway has the advantage, that you avoid something like highway=path + pathway=* and Renderer will still process them based on highway=path. As well shifting all the highway=footway,cycleway,bridleway,steps,path,via_ferrata to pathway might break a lot of current data-consumers.
For me highway makes sense for the via ferrata (Klettersteige) which are part of somehow hiking routes. Though leisure would be a better fit for the ones
“artificial created as tourist attraction”.
Perhaps, you appeal to shared_use via ferratas? Shouldn’t they be path then?
Something like that would be rather highway than leisure for me.
Wenn man von der Sache nichts versteht und nicht beobachtet was in openstreetmap als via_ferrata erfasst wird, dann zitiert man Wikipedia.
It’s a picture, not sure why the forum doesn’t want to display it and maybe you should read Tag:highway=via_ferrata - OpenStreetMap Wiki first… the picture from wikipedia is matching exactly what our wiki is describing…
I would prefer you stay on topic and not getting offensive. Thank you.
Never mind. Via ferrata is a business, just like the hiking paths were. I still do not see why via_ferrata keeps popping up here as if it was golden rod.
BTW: I stopped fighting for my hiking paths that turned via_ferrata by some tourism agency investment. I am fine with them off the standard view 
On the OSM Carto issue tracker, I observed people who would not map a path because of it appearing on the standard view, I cannot fault them.
PS: The picture linked above certainly highway=ladder – under a the most special tag should win rationale. That it’s part of a via_ferrata route given away by the steel cable on the side to fasten the via_ferrata kit. If that was a mere assisted_trail on a hiking route, the picture would look much the same, except missing the extra via_ferrata cable, both besides the ladder and besides the path.
I completely agree with this, except for the “clearly separated”, because we will always have ways that fit into 2 categories at the same time. It’s not black and white. People are fighting over unclassified vs. residential vs. service, because it depends on perspective, and it’s fine that way.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Are you saying that the new highway-values should allow access-tags like motor_vehicle=yes[1]? That the default access-tags should be well documented[2]? That the default access-tags can vary per country[3]?
Indeed, path has a wide range of meanings from the ephemeral to the well-built. Technically, trail is only slightly less flexible, encompassing both rugged hiking trails and urban, well-built bike trails. However, I think either term conjures up a narrower mental image by default. These connotations probably differ significantly based on the speaker’s dialect and background.
Based on my suburban Midwestern U.S. upbringing, I’d consider a typical path to be an urban park path and a typical trail to be a rural hiking trail – even though I’m intimately familiar with urban bike trails, which are technically shared use paths, and even though I would describe the hiking trail as “a path through the woods”. If I were new to OSM and saw presets for “Path” and “Trail”, I’d assume they apply to these images, respectively:
The more a way differs from one of these stereotypes, the more I’d have to make a judgment call.
Even if, according to some dialects, someone leaving shoeprints in the mud has just forged a new path, I’m not confident that a mapper would know they should map it in the first place, let alone apply the Path preset. We’d probably need a separate preset (labeled “Foot Track” in American English), regardless of whether it comes with one tag or two.
I understand what you’re getting at. It’s kind of like how bikeway encompasses both bike path and bike lane. Unfortunately, path and pathway are almost completely interchangeable. Pathway just places more emphasis on the infrastructure than the routing, much like road versus roadway.
The only possible advantage of pathway is that it has not been used in OSM context, and does not carry all the baggage of path. I’m still not sure what to make of that.
