Is “trace” more uniformly understood? American English speakers would equate the two terms. However, “trace” is much less frequently used as a noun; it mainly only appears in the names of historic trails and the roads named after them.
I honestly don’t know of a single word in Irish English that would name this. If I had to give someone directions to follow this, I’d probably describe it rather than name it, e.g. “a faint path” or “a barely visible trail”. Which actually fits fairly well with tagging it highway=path, trail_visibility_bad.
I certainly wouldn’t use “track” for a way that doesn’t allow some form of 4-wheel vehicle access (or at least look like it once did).
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The American term “track” just refers to any continuous series of prints in the ground made by something in motion, be it two running shoes, four paws, four hooves, or four cartwheels. Qualified, it can even refer to railroad tracks, racetracks, or running tracks (leisure=track). Anyhow, it’d be far too late and a terrible idea to overload highway=track with yet another meaning.
Sometimes I hear references to “bushwhack”, which places the emphasis on obstacles along the way rather than evidence of something that has gone before.
Trace is not far from the German term Spuren. Actually it translates so in the dictionary. Our hiking/mountaineering literature differentiates paths and traces of people walking somewhere.
I stopped tagging trail_visibility, these terms “excellent, good, intermediate, bad, horrible, no” are just an arbitrary scale that could be applied just as well to a restaurant critique. The terms have no connection to peoples experiences. Once I thought, intermediate meant, there are sections with no path, just like intermittent on a stream, where there are times with no water, until I learnt, that good meant, sections without a path. (I guess, this recently has been “fixed” in the documentation.)
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AS any scale people will have different opinions when something is good and something is excellent, but I think there would be very few disagreements between good and bad. Now thinkiing about it, maybe a mention along “a vast majority of frequently travelled trails, especially outside of rocky areas, are trail_visibility=excellent”. At least I think that is the case in my experience.
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and also outside of paved squares.
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Where there are no hiking trails :-).
How much does it matter for openstreetmap, whether I am on a hike/ramble or running daily errands?
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Where there are no hiking trails :-).
at least there are hiking routes, whether these can be called part of a trail may depend on what “trail” means