[Survey] How to tag pathways of unknown classification?

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@julcnx

Important Note: Although the current wiki suggests it can be used for pathways, this wasn’t the original intention. Most renderers treat it like a minor road.

Some background context, for those who missed this thread:

[RFC] Deprecating `highway=road` in Favor of `highway=unknown`

For what it’s worth, this explanation puts a lot of the blame on the word “road”, but the confusion is not intrinsic to this word. The reason for the confusion is that highway=road was redefined in 2016 (also in the main map features table). By then, data consumers like OSM Carto and Mapbox had already been interpreting it for years according to the approved definition that only encompassed what (English-speaking) laypeople consider to be roads, not primitive paths. (The proposal is literally t…

[RFC] Deprecating `highway=road` in Favor of `highway=unknown`

We can be reasonably confident that certain subsets of highway=road represent roads or streets as opposed to paths: 17,732 (36%) of remaining highway=road ways predate the 2016 edit that seemingly unilaterally redefined highway=road. At least 6,994 (14%) come from a 2013 import of roads (not paths) from the National Land Survey of Finland. 2,324 (5%) have name=*, which we can examine for names that sound like roads or streets. 1,437 (3%) were likely mapped as part of a series of HOT Tasking Ma…