Sometimes cutlines follow power transmission lines over fairly long distances (kilometers, tens of kilometers) and have highway=track of a grade (tracktype=grade3 or so) to support a high-clearance and/or 4-wheel-drive maintenance vehicle for access to power towers. These can often be seen in satellite imagery, if they exist.
I have mapped many man_made=cutlines. They are cutlines. I would not āautomaticallyā consider them a path, even though it is very likely that they might be or are a path. In the latter case, I wouldnāt change any tagging in OSM, even if in the real world I were to use the cutline as a path (because I happened to be hiking in the area and found myself on a cutline and it was a possible route for me to hike to another place I might want to hike to). If I then later fired up an OSM editing session, saw (or entered) the cutline as data in OSM and thought to myself āhm, should I add highway=path here?ā I would only do so if there were a clear highway=path (or highway=track) ON that cutline (in my personal experience / from my earlier on-the-ground survey). Especially if I didnāt know there were a highway=path or highway=track there, I wouldnāt enter one by speculation, simply ābecause it is a cutline and is likely a path.ā
I think these attitudes and behaviors are in harmony with āhow we mapā in OSM.
Amusingly the first photo for ātrail_visibility=goodā is labeled with the following:
āWhile the way is not directly visible. As soon as one advances around 20m, way goes up on the right and is very well visible again. Only feature is that for a few (50) meters the trail is not really defined. Orientation is very easy however.ā
That photo always confused me, it makes sense with the caption.
The second is better as a faint path through grass.
If āgoodā can include 50m gaps in visibility that require orienteering, excellent is really the only value which indicates a trail is adequate for the average hiker.
Iāve looked at that photo a few times and wondered where the path is. Never noticed the description, now it makes some sense.
Might it be possible to get consensus here on a better replacement picture that illustrates good?
To go one step further: if changes to the text are too contentious, then maybe we could work on a gallery with pictures from all over the world, with trails of different surfaces and difficulties? Like Key:smoothness/Gallery - OpenStreetMap Wiki We could limit this to examples where there is broad agreement
I honestly wouldnāt consider the faint path through grass one as "goodā in a meaningful sense of the word either. Good is essentially an intermediate value and intermediate is the beginning of bad which continues on for three more vague values.
Itās not a useful key without wording changes, but wording changes will make it (temporarily) more broken than it already is which will probably deter changes passing. I do generally agree with more photo examples being good but Iām not sure the key will really benefit from it and realistically speaking having proper photos would probably break historical usage.
Iāve soft proposed a new visibility key based on discussions and looking at different formal systems that should be more grounded in non-alpine specific reality and verifiable. Ideally this or something like it would slowly take over and then trail_visibility be used as a fallback.
First observation: Trail visibility is not tagged much - If you are into couch mapping, this is your chance
Second observation: In my opinion, you will end up tagging 95+ % trail_visibility=excellent, even where currently there is good or intermediate in the data. If set, good is the most used. Which clearly contradicts the documentation.
Spoiler: A 100 m in Axamer Lizum were pathless (evading snow field), I guess they are no longer
Update on the search for actual practice: One more section of pathless terrain, videolink; Corresponding 284m OSM way was only mapped the day before the competition. As can be seen on strava heatmap, people just traverse the pasture as they please.
Interestingly, the official map has no path at all there, only in the scrub above and later up to the ridge. I know such fragmented paths from other maps as well, especially those aimed at mountaineers. This brings up an idea regarding a phrase, that has not been questioned yet in this topic:
What does map recommended/required mean? When you do not see where to continue, you can look into the map, and learn where the next path is. So you can close the gap.
Mind you, that was before the advent of routers. Routers require a continuous track. People looking at paper maps do not.
Last week I was camping and rock climbing in New Yorkās Adirondack Park and encountered trails with a large range of poor visibility. Most of these are in this area to the south/east of Chapel Pond and are mostly used by rock climbers to access various cliffs. They are low-traffic mostly-informal trails which do exist, but just barely.
I found that the riparian area through which these paths travel was incredibly difficult to navigate with informal herd paths, game trails crisscrossing, magnified by lush vegetation and regular water-flows erasing evidence of foot travel. For this low-lying area, visibility was the dominant challenge rather than exposure, strength, or technique.
Up on the surrounding slopes the trails often crossed large boulders and blow-downs and donāt get enough traffic to thoroughly compact a treadway. While there is a trail that is more-clear than the surrounding woods, it isnāt always easy to see here either.
I have a desire to map these approach trails as they are the only safe access to otherwise vertical terrain and they do exist, but at the same time I have a desire to indicate that they are often very hard to follow due to poor visibility.
From what I observe, trail visibility is actually lending itself much more to such paths than to what colloquially here is called hiking paths, as those are close to 100% TV=excellent, apart from some NFS Trail Class Matrix class 1 ones that are actually advertised for hiking, i.e. by a guidepost. I know such in my local area, it is a rare pleasure to get by there
@rhhs can you make sense of my proposal, to make the documentation mirror that practice in its abstract:
How would that reflect in defining values? That would cut all the ties to hiking/mountain hiking/sac_scale. It is not in the data, as far as I can tell, it certainly is not in SAC (caps) scale neither. TV is a solitary key, an OSM innovation, something some Germans came up with when trying to be finicky, it should be documented as such.
Trail_visibility has no connection to trail type or difficulty. It only describes the trailās condition in term how clear it is. Whether it has been cleared of vegetation, well worn or even bound by some type of fencing. Tje more it is visually seperated from the surrounding terrain the better the associated value.
I agree, though there is a historical connection. @Hungerburg I agree itās worth mentioning back-country and wilderness paths, but I think thereās nothing against tagging other hiking paths with TV to reassure the hiker that there will be no problem with visibility. Else why have the excellent and good values? There are plenty of hiking paths here in Bulgaria, even ones that are part of European long distance paths, that are trail_visibility=intermediate or worse (see the photo in my post 157 above). Of course it only really starts to matter for safety when it gets intermediate or worse.
With alpine ātrailsā sure, but outside of that? Not really. Itās usually extremely safe to walk through a field of over grown grass that contains a ātrailā in only the most abstract meaning of the word. Same goes for trails with lots of turns or hilly areas. Same goes for over hanging branches. Maybe the trail visibility is pore because you canāt make it out beyond a couple of feet in those situations, but so what? Even a mildly fit person can duck under a branch or go around a jog in the path without either one leading to an injury. And no if someone scratches their arm on a tree branch once in a while or whatever that doesnāt make the trail unsafe.
The āso whatā is that losing the trail makes passage slow and can likely lead to getting lost. Iāve read numerous reports of wilderness rescues triggered because hikers were lost and couldnāt get themselves out of the wilderness as bad weather or darkness set in that they werenāt prepared to handle. Physical injury isnāt the only possible safety concern.
I just watched a short video yesterday in which the creator described a hiking trip where they were navigating via an app on their phone and were trying to hike out as weather turned bad. Moisture damaged their phone and then they got lost when the trail they were following became invisible in a scrubby clearing. With no paper map or GPS navigation ability and worse weather than they were prepared to handle they chose to initiate a wilderness rescue via satellite beacon rather than risk hypothermia.
Tagging trail_visibility can make it possible for renderers make it more clear which trails are going to be easy to follow and which will be more difficult to follow and allow routers to avoid suggesting routes which are likely to be difficult to follow.
You suppressed informal paths, that is where I see trail_visibility mapped to great extent. After all, attaching TV=excellent to a dirty shortcut on the parking lot gives the thing much more substance.
I sympathise with your endeavour, to turn this key into something, that can be more reliably determined, as you seem to be into long-distance hiking. This brings up a question: What exactly is a hiking path? Hiking is an activity, can be performed on roads too. So how to reword ma proposed abstract to mention hiking?
And yes, getting lost is not a minor cause for emergency calls.
I just watched a short video yesterday in which the creator described a hiking trip where they were navigating via an app on their phone and were trying to hike out as weather turned bad. Moisture damaged their phone and then they got lost when the trail they were following became invisible in a scrubby clearing. With no paper map or GPS navigation ability and worse weather than they were prepared to handle they chose to initiate a wilderness rescue via satellite beacon rather than risk hypothermia.
thatās so incredibly careless to rely just on a phone in an area you donāt know.
Sure, that can happen. Iām sure thereās plenty of scary anecdotal news stories out there about any number of things that we could use to confirm whatever opinion we have about this to. Personally Iād prefer to ground conversations in something a little more substantial and relevant then edge cases that thereās zero evidence OpenStreetMap had anything to do with or would fix if only we implemented my preferred way of doing things. Maybe thatās just me though, but itās still a fact that in 99.9% of cases no one gets seriously injured or has to be rescued because of scratching their arm on a tree branch or there being a bend in the trail even though both affect visibility. Which is what I was talking about in the message your responding to. Not wilderness hiking in the dark or bad weather. Iām sure you get the difference.
Sure, but thatās kind of a non-sequitur because any tag can make it āpossibleā for renderers to do all kinds of things. Thatās the whole point. It doesnāt automatically that because tags make things possible trail_visibility is the best way to make it more clear which trails going to be easy to follow or not though. Let alone does it mean we even need a specific tag do to that in the first place. Sure though, tags make it possible for renders to render things. And?
And? What do you propose? Is there a better way to make it clear which trails are easy or difficult to follow? Or do you want to deprecate the tag because āweā donāt need it?
Thatās my personal preference, because I donāt think itās a very interesting thing to know about a short informal path to a parking lot. But if someone wants to add that tag, I donāt mind.
Thatās up to the individual mapper to decide. I see no need to define it sharply.
It might have been in one of the other discussions related to this, but Iāve proposed several things to show trail difficulty. One being adopting more official and regionally known systems for evaluating trails. Another idea is encouraging more mapping of physical obstacles along the trail and creating better tags to do that with. As well as using the surface tag, which could involve expending some surface keys to be along a better gradient specific to trail hiking then currently exists. I think at least a couple of people, including myself, have suggested using this tag simplifying the number of options. You could do that by creating other tags to use as a fall back, for instance with trail_visibility=excellent could be replaced with something like markers=yes/no/intermittent/whatever, or simply by getting rid of them (At the end of the day is it really that important to tag a trail with excellent visibility as such? Probably not). Etc. Etc. Thereās a range of options here though, they arenāt mutually exclusive, and there isnāt (nor should there be) one simple answer or tagging scheme that we can all get behind to make it so people hiking at night in a blizzard wonāt injure themselves. Of course none of those options are going to ever be embraced or used by anyone if thatās the only target market you care about.
2 things.
Itās never going to be āclearā through tags like this which trails are easy or difficult to follow because they subjective and OpenStreetMap is a database of coordinates for real world, physical objects. Not personal and/or emotional philosophical concepts. Thatās not to say there canāt be a tagging scheme that serves the purpose your talking about, but it would have at least be rooted in and heavily supported by some kind of physical real world standard that doesnāt change based on their person, their mood, or what condition the trail is in at any given moment. And this tagging scheme just aināt it. Not to say you couldnāt at least somewhat there with it, but that would take an honest and extremely thought out plan by the people discussing it that I just donāt see happening.
Iām not really sure why you put āweā in quotes, but whatever. At the end of the day āweā probably donāt āneedā it, but your kind of putting words in my mouth by framing my opinion that way. I could really care less if anyone āneedsā the tag or not. Itās not my job to pander everything I do on here to some imaginary audience of people that arenāt involved in the discussion and probably donāt use OpenStreetMap to begin with either. Does that mean we should just get rid of the tag? No and I never said I thought we should. Itās not an either or thing. We can improve this to the point where itās at least semi-usable in the real world, supplement it with other tagging schemes Etc. Etc., and people who think itās the best thing to happen since the invention of the computer or whatever can continue using it all they want until it rots on the vine. I could really care less either way, but this discussion should at least involve some kind of actionable conclusion at some point. Does that mean it has to involve depreciating the tag? No, of course not and again I never said it did. But it would help if we came up with an alternative that is actually viable and goes beyond the endless capitulation about irrelevant nonsense.
