Yes yes… another path/trail topic — but hey, you folks seem to love polls, so here we go!
Background:
In places like Thailand, it’s common to see bicycle=no (often with horse=no) added to legally accessible mountain trails that are perceived as difficult — steep, rocky, or overgrown. These tags are often added by hikers intending to “warn” others, despite no signage or official restriction.
Most mountain trails here are legally open to bicycles — and often even used by motorcycles. By default, highway=path allows foot, bicycle, horse, and even motorcycle access unless explicitly restricted by law or signage.
These trails often lack tags like surface, mtb:scale, or sac_scale. Despite efforts to promote physical condition tags, mappers — especially new ones — default to simple yes/no tagging in iD based on perceived difficulty.
The result: trails marked bicycle=no are still often used by skilled mountain bikers, and the no value discourages usage, surveys, and routing despite no legal restrictions.
I’ve raised this before but haven’t received clear guidance. I hope this poll helps shape a better tagging approach.
Poll (Multiple Choice): How should we handle bicycle=no on trails that are legally accessible but perceived as difficult?
Multiple answers allowed
Options:
Remove bicycle=no
Replace with bicycle=yes
Replace with bicycle=discouraged
Replace with bicycle=unknown
Leave the tag as-is
Add mtb=no
Add smoothness=impassable
Add sac_scale=?
Other
0voters
Notes:
Remove bicycle=no — Only use bicycle=no if the trail has been surveyed specifically for bicycles and is legally inaccessible.
Replace with bicycle=yes — If the trail is known to be legally unrestricted, it should be tagged as publicly accessible, regardless of perceived difficulty.
Replace with bicycle=discouraged — Suggests the trail may be dangerous or unsuitable, without implying a legal ban. However, this value is controversial, as discouraged is intended for legal access restrictions. Hint: Can be removed once the trail is surveyed by mountain bikers and properly tagged.
Replace with bicycle=unknown — Indicates that access hasn’t been surveyed and remains unclear for bicycles.
Leave the tag as-is — Acknowledge that contributors may be trying to help. Even if not legally restricted, bicycle=no can serve as a safety signal. Still, this is controversial and should ideally be replaced once surveyed by cyclists.
Add mtb=no — Marks the trail as physically unsuitable for mountain bikes, while keeping legal access open. Offers a simpler alternative for those who prefer binary tagging.
Add smoothness=impassable — Indicates the trail is impassable for wheeled vehicles and only suitable on foot.
Add sac_scale=? — Use sac_scale to reflect hiking difficulty and indicate the trail was surveyed on foot. The ? invites improvement and helps educate newer mappers.
Other — Share your own suggestions or local tagging practices in the comments.
Can’t add mtb:scale without knowing the exact scale!
Though using mtb:scale=? could be a temporary solution for trails that are known to be rideable until a proper value is determined, but that’s not yet a recognized value.
No. Generally in OSM if we don’t know a value we don’t tag it as “?” (or “unknown”). We simply omit the tag.
This sounds like another case where you don’t really have much information (otherwise you would have some idea about mtb:scale=*), but want a trail to show up in your app in a certain manner.
Is it, though? If access=unknown is widely used and not deprecated, clearly there’s precedent for tagging uncertainty when it reflects real-world ambiguity. I’m sure there are similar use cases where partial knowledge is still considered valuable.
If I have useful info — whether about access or rideability — I’ll contribute it. It might not fit a narrow interpretation of the wiki, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
I like the ? approach because it educates mapper on the tag, and may encourage new ones to refine or validate it. That’s how collaborative mapping evolves.
And yes, if actual mapper consensus forms around a better way to signal incomplete tagging, I’ll adapt — but not at the expense of discouraging useful contributions.
FWIW I use access=unknown to mean “no one knows the access rights here”, not “I personally don’t know the access rights here”. (That’s not an unusual situation in the UK!)
The correct way to express “I don’t know” is fixme, surely?
Just to add my 2p, I tend to use it where I’ve been there and still can’t figure it out. Where I am (England/Wales) the default would be “no access”, but sometimes it looks like there actually is.
I wouldn’t add “fixme” en masse (to, say, lots of things added from imagery) because that would look too much like I couldn’t be bothered to have a look myself.
This is a reasonable compromise. It is still not perfect. Not practical for who? with what skill level? Using what equipment?
mtb:practical=yes adds little information in my opinion. For example, if my skill level is such that I can ride a trail rated mtb:scale=3 or easier (probably the majority of riders cannot ride anything too much more difficult than this), mtb:practical=yes really provides me little indications as to whether I can safely ride the trail.
I will say that this whole discussion (and the related one on dirt bikes) seems like tagging for some renderer or app. Someone wants these trails to show up in a particular app, but they don’t want to put in the effort (either by direct survey, or soliciting input from the people riding these trails), to actually determine a mtb:scale=* value. I also don’t buy the argument that certain types of trail users don’t want to edit the map. I see a lot of mountain bikers I know around here making edits, mainly to mtb:scale.
This is a really important distinction.
…or simply omit the tag?
This seems reasonable for access, but doesn’t really apply for mtb:scale. If one visits a trail, even if they are not a mountain biker, they should have some idea of mtb:scale (or they can talk to a mountain biker along the trail and ask their opinion as to the difficulty)
That’s a very narrow (and honestly obsessive) take. mtb:scale should ideally come from riders who’ve actually ridden the trail. Rough guesses or secondhand estimates aren’t reliable.
If you had read the background, you’d see the issue is that many hikers avoid adding sac_scale, and instead misuse access tags. So realistically, they’re not going to tag mtb:scale or provide the kind of detail others could estimate from.
Whether mtb:scale should be used to indicate a way is rideable but of unknown difficulty is another topic, which can be solved through a separate poll.
That’s great for your region, but it doesn’t apply everywhere. In mine, most riders don’t contribute — OSM is seen as too complex, time-consuming and dealing with online friction not going to help.
To those who voted “Other”: perhaps you meant “add mtb:scale” — and maybe skipped the poll background info ?
To clarify: these bicycle=no trails aren’t always confirmed rideable, but they are consistently not legally restricted.
For trails known to be rideable, adding mtb:scale along with bicycle=yes makes perfect sense. When difficulty is unknown, the best approach is less clear — I’ll run a separate poll to explore that.
Or maybe we read the poll background info and would have suggested other tags like width=, est_width=, surface=, smoothness= or even just a quick’n’dirty informal=yes/no, for example.
Others, like @Richard, have suggested adding fixme= tags, but as @SomeoneElse noted, adding them en masse isn’t really helpful either. I’d say that a way with only a highway=path tag already and in and of itself tells me that it’s probably a narrow and rough pathway—and in dire need of further mapping.
Fair point — and I do add those tags when I have the info. But as mentioned in the background, I often don’t, and I don’t expect original mappers to provide that level of detail either. What I do know is that they’ve been using access tags to signal suitability, even in areas without legal restrictions. Some trails I’ve personally surveyed and tagged more thoroughly, but in many cases, the most I can do — as most have suggested — is remove bicycle=no . The rest depends on local knowledge and surveys.
I was hesitating, and you convinced me to vote Other. My proposal: add a special value to mtb:scale that means “unknown but probably not safe”. This would ensure that we err on the side of safety.
— but hey, you folks seem to love polls, so here we go!
Poll (Multiple Choice): How should we handle 
Multiple answers allowed
?