Tag trail_visibility: Proposed Improvements for this Descriptive Tag

Here short of 12hrs footage of trail-running over 87km distance. Here corresponding GPX of the Long Trail.

First observation: Trail visibility is not tagged much - If you are into couch mapping, this is your chance :wink:

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 :slight_smile:

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 Yorkā€™s 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.

Hereā€™s a photo album of a few of these trails, arranged from better visibility to worse visibility.

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 donā€™t get enough traffic to thoroughly compact a treadway. While there is a trail that is more-clear than the surrounding woods, it isnā€™t 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 :slight_smile:

@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 trailā€™s 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 itā€™s worth mentioning back-country and wilderness paths, but I think thereā€™s 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 ā€œtrailsā€ sure, but outside of that? Not really. Itā€™s usually extremely safe to walk through a field of over grown grass that contains a ā€œtrailā€ 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 canā€™t 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 doesnā€™t make the trail unsafe.

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The ā€œso whatā€ is that losing the trail makes passage slow and can likely lead to getting lost. Iā€™ve read numerous reports of wilderness rescues triggered because hikers were lost and couldnā€™t get themselves out of the wilderness as bad weather or darkness set in that they werenā€™t prepared to handle. Physical injury isnā€™t 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.

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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.

thatā€™s so incredibly careless to rely just on a phone in an area you donā€™t know.

I sense hyperbole. Relying on just a phone is the normal. Heck, before I had a GPS phone, I had to relay on my senses alone!

Sure, that can happen. Iā€™m sure thereā€™s 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 Iā€™d prefer to ground conversations in something a little more substantial and relevant then edge cases that thereā€™s zero evidence OpenStreetMap had anything to do with or would fix if only we implemented my preferred way of doing things. Maybe thatā€™s just me though, but itā€™s 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. Iā€™m sure you get the difference.

Sure, but thatā€™s kind of a non-sequitur because any tag can make it ā€œpossibleā€ for renderers to do all kinds of things. Thatā€™s the whole point. It doesnā€™t 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 ā€œweā€ donā€™t need it?

Thatā€™s my personal preference, because I donā€™t think itā€™s a very interesting thing to know about a short informal path to a parking lot. But if someone wants to add that tag, I donā€™t mind.

Thatā€™s 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 Iā€™ve 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. Thereā€™s a range of options here though, they arenā€™t mutually exclusive, and there isnā€™t (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 wonā€™t injure themselves. Of course none of those options are going to ever be embraced or used by anyone if thatā€™s the only target market you care about.

2 things.

  1. Itā€™s never going to be ā€œclearā€ 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. Thatā€™s not to say there canā€™t 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 doesnā€™t change based on their person, their mood, or what condition the trail is in at any given moment. And this tagging scheme just ainā€™t it. Not to say you couldnā€™t 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 donā€™t see happening.

  2. Iā€™m not really sure why you put ā€œweā€ in quotes, but whatever. At the end of the day ā€œweā€ probably donā€™t ā€œneedā€ it, but your kind of putting words in my mouth by framing my opinion that way. I could really care less if anyone ā€œneedsā€ the tag or not. Itā€™s not my job to pander everything I do on here to some imaginary audience of people that arenā€™t involved in the discussion and probably donā€™t 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. Itā€™s not an either or thing. We can improve this to the point where itā€™s at least semi-usable in the real world, supplement it with other tagging schemes Etc. Etc., and people who think itā€™s 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.

Well, I am not into mapping such either. But I think documentation should be based on actual usage of the tag, not which hobby horse the person writing the document is riding on. Donā€™t you think so too?

Well, if it is not something on the ground but a mere subjective decision, then why should it be in OSM at all?

This shows a hiking guidepost. MĆ¼llerhĆ¼tte and Wilder Freiger are named, but there is no path to/up there, so TV=no for the OSM path in the data would be a good fit. From looking at other peoples screens, I learned that eg. MapsMe does a great job with TV=no, such paths get rendered so faint, that people instinctively decide to not go there :wink:

I changed the fine article to get up to findings here, the uncontested ones at least.

Thanks. At least itā€™s something :man_shrugging: