Yeah, it looks like a lot of them are desire lines in urban paths and things like that… can’t really blame people for using trail_visibility like this, even if this isn’t what the key was originally meant for.
The most practical solution might just be to say “Unambiguous path everywhere”? It should not make a difference for mountain paths: well constructed paths are unambiguous, and conversely if a path is eroded and poorly maintained then it is probably no longer unambiguous!
(I do wonder how much of this is splitting hairs, and how closely people read the Wiki…)
There is no path there at least not where the poles are, but a winter-hiking piste will be there, when it snows? Is trail_visibility applicable them? They have grooming e.g.
Do not forget the pictures, @SomeoneElse mentioned them. Wonder what excellent would be tagged on, if the OSM pictures showed e.g. the path up Männlichen, which is one of the Type specimens for the hiking taxon of the SAC Hiking Scale? Here you go: File:2008-07-20 Männlichen - 4.jpg - Wikimedia Commons BTW: The last 30m are tagged “mountain_hiking” - I suspect, because you have to lift your legs
I took this to mean a path that continuously exists, but may become faint, or faded in areas (somewhat overgrown, but you can see in vegetation where it has been repeatedly trodden etc). Someone experienced will be able to follow the path, but someone inexperienced may become disorientated.
Overall I find the “requirements” part a clearer non-overlapping breakdown than the descriptions, though they’re subject to experience and routefinding technique.
Perhaps for good:
A continuous path which is always followable, but may occasionally become faint or ambiguous and have to be searched for.
That might be less contradictory sounding.
Ah, typo on my end. I meant “Pathless (should only be used for short segments between paths to help with routing).” Could change that more to:
Pathless (should only be used for commonly used short segments between paths to help with routing)."
So people don’t just make up random connectors.
They’re more examples of what would constitute a path. I do think that rather than just “this is a path because some deer made a track”, there should be a human element to it. Perhaps that sentence should be changed to:
These aspects include the visibility of human impacts or construction on the path itself (differences in surfaces, vegetation, angle, depth, etc.) as well as human-added markers such as trail blazes, poles and cairns.
I think that clears it up, but also makes it a bit more abstract (hopefully in a good way).
There are some informal paths that are unambiguous because they are heavily used and the terrain they go though shows impacts very clearly. I’m not sure that should be a hard rule, but I also think that pushing such paths down a maximum of good isn’t a bad idea because of the lack of formal maintenance in case they are impacted by heavy rain, landslides, fallen trees detours, etc.
What if someone is over 2m tall and they have huge legs.
I find movement problematic when I write up routes - I’m 5’10" and my partner is 5’4". We can have different types of movement over the same terrain (hands used for balance, being able to step up something vs mantle, etc). This is more of an aside though.
One major issue with pictures is it’s hard to show a path that comes and goes, because you are generally in one state or another. I have some backpacking photos of informal or abandoned trails I can try and dig up later on in the process.
If I’d have read that ealier Then I’d made a different picture than the ones below - taken right at the point of the transition - standing on a small bridge over a drain, one looking forwards, the other looking backwards, camera position nearly fix.
Note that both show a constructed path, there are sure-fire clues on the ground. There are guideposts at both ends. Under current regime the one in the woods should get excellent and the other might get anything ranging from good to no, depending on which clue gets applied. I am fairly certain, that according the SAC Hiking scale this will classify for mountain hiking.
Changes in appearance like this may have prompted dissolving visibility from difficulty in historic OSM times. It’s both easy hiking, isn’t it, technically? I have seen that too often: In situations like this, people will just head straight to the next visible road, even when that is much more inconvenient than walking where the terrain provides an easy way.
Maybe needless to say: The mapped path on OSM there followed the streamlet down to the road, there was no path mapped over the obviously graded terrain on the meadow side - That route may have seen its heydays, strava shows no heat there in any direction, but such things do not fade so quickly - still, this is the way to find the guidepost at the end near the farm that can be seen in the foto. Certainly, one can go as please. One can read the clues at wish.
UPDATE: Here picture of the path as mapped. I left it mapped a path, only added the informal=yes tag. Curiously, I did not bother to tag trail_visibility onto any of those paths. Perhaps because I am just into this topic because, read next post…
This thread is about what it takes to make appropriately apply the highway=path tag to something on the ground or not on the ground, so 100 posts is not much at all.
The aspect/clues things is just a way to point that it covers both the path itself and markers. I gave a response above about changing that section to:
“These aspects include the visibility of human impacts or construction on the path itself (differences in surfaces, vegetation, angle, depth, etc.) as well as human-added markers such as trail blazes, poles and cairns.”
In this example the photos are a little blurry so it’s hard to see what happens in the mid ground - that seems like it’d fall into either intermediate or bad if just mapped as a whole based on my proposed changes earlier.
I’m not sure what “pet features” would complicate things. There can be many things that impact the visibility of a path (being lined with stones, footprints, vegetation impacts, ruts, grading, supporting stonework, imported gravel or sand, etc) - having some general description of those to clarify the intent seems reasonable. Do you want every possible aspect of a path labeled, or none? I don’t think most people would read that and think "well I can see a great clear footpath, but there’s no little rocks lining it so visibility=no.
What we are trying to tag here may at first sight seem very digital: is the trail visible or not? What we’re actually trying to do here is scale some quality of the trail: how easy is it to follow it? The problem with quality is that everybody has a feeling for it (most often the same feeling) but it’s very hard to describe it in words. This is the theme of Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (where while discussing “quality” at a highly fundamental level, the narrator goes on a cross-country hike!). But because we’re supposed to only tag things that are verifiable, we’re trying to do the impossible here: describe quality in words by making a checklist of words that describe certain categories of quality. I think we should sometimes step away from that checklist, and make sure that the words we use don’t obscure what we all know (have a feeling for): what is a high quality visibility path, and what is not.
The difference between “excellent” and “good” is like the difference between “strongly agree” and “agree” on a Likert scale survey question. Both mean that the path is clearly visible/that you agree, but the difference between them is hard to describe. “search” makes me thing of searching for Easter eggs, where you sometimes have to move things to check if there isn’t an egg under it. Both excellent and good visibility paths are always visible, but good paths aren’t as obviously visible as excellent paths. Look at the pictures on the wiki Talk: the ones for excellent have a path surface that’s different from the areas next to the path, while the one for good is all grass and not very clear at first sight, but when you click on the photo you can then clearly see where it goes. Maybe good can be described as “A continuous path which is always visible, but may occasionally become faint or ambiguous.” @Hungerburg I’d tag your first picture in your post 146 as intermediate or even bad, even though one could say that it’s “constructed” and so has to be tagged as excellent. Does that describe the problem you have with it? It’s what I mean by not sticking to words and use it as a checklist: we should use our own judgement of what quality is, even when the word checklist we made disagrees. I’d tag the path in the picture in my post 135 with excellent because even though there is no path visible on the ground, it’s clear without any doubt where the path goes. Maybe we should add a few words that mappers should not follow the table by the letter but should use their own judgement?
I agree with the first part of this, but I don’t think the aspects are a “checklist” per se, just possible examples of what visibility can be. The fact that there are cairns but not poles or markers doesn’t make trailblazing 1 out of 3. I do think we can come up with some pretty universal ways of describing the overall impacts of visibility and terrain (there will always be some subjective disagreement, but at least it shouldn’t vary more than one level up or down). An excellent path doesn’t have to have differences in surface, vegetation, slope, depth etc - those are just some aspects that can (or may not) impact visibility and hence the ease of following it.
That seems like it’d work well, I don’t personally associate searching with peering under rocks, but the fact that it can be faint or ambiguous implies that occasional effort might have to be expended. I expanded on intermediate a bit to try and keep it more distinct from good while still keeping to the spirit of the original / skill requirements.
I’ve updated this section based on feedback, and can see the point in having the last two paragraphs down at the bottom of the page vs up top.
Bad, intermediate, and horrible by definition cover inconsistent visibility. In the (admittedly contrived) example of there being 15km of excellent with 200m of no, it’d make sense to break those up into segments, but in general an entire path/trail, or at least large segments of it can have varying conditions.
I broke up a few trails that suddenly shift from hiking to technical climbing, or are either abandoned or very inconsistently maintained so are good from a pass to a large popular lake just due to boot traffic, but are bad below it… I didn’t try to map every small gap or slightly overgrown area.
Update: it could be worth mentioning at the bottom of the page to choose the lowest applicable rating. If a trail would be a mix of 50% excellent, 25% good, and 25% intermediate the overall visibility would be intermediate.
“Path mostly visible, but has sections where it is hard to find or short gaps where it isn’t visible but a visible section is within sight.”
While it still rains all day, one more rocky picture from past hikings A path mapped T6 on OSM, the UIAA II terrain you have to get by is hidden in front, path as in view is UIAA I only, hands for balance.
Trailblazing there is excellent, where you need it and no where you don’t. Where you need it means, two or three steps in the wrong direction and you may find yourselves stuck in UIAA IV terrain.
No idea, what the SAC would classify this, but OSM T6 seems adequate. trail_visibility was tagged horrible, not by me.
Here the path as an ordered-node-list (The UIAA II section hides between 5 and 6):
I feel you on that interpretation - I generally feel like I can routefind as good or better than most so only really want markers for when something has a real sense of consequence to it. For a route I wouldn’t bother putting nodes past that fin coming up for example, but yours make sense (not sure they’d make sense just on topo however without very good descriptions) though 6 and 7 could probably be dropped.
I’d be hesitant to mark a path/trail, and not a pathless path / alpine route, as excellent visibility just because it was there “when it mattered”. Perhaps breaking this part off into a short path which has excellent trail blazing, horrible surface, and is T6, and having the rest of it up to this crux as T2/3 would be best, as it shows where it goes beyond what most people are going to comfortable with on a hike, but also where they could probably get to easily enough.
I did something similar here, where you can easily hike from parking on either side, but there’s a ~10m bolted rappel on the east (not always vertical, but slick sandstone) and some possibly free soloable down climbs before that on the west, but they’re definitely more in the realm of climbing than hiking. Before the entire thing was just marked as a hiking trail, which is… misleading. We did an XC loop bypassing south, but that’s really a choose your own adventure thing.
@erutan I think we agree. I’ve implemented some of your suggestions in the wiki Talk page text proposal. Hope you find it acceptable?
I didn’t use your referral to guidepost as there are other ways of showing which path to take at a junction, like this example (Bulgarian trail blazing standard):
@Hungerburg thanks for the nice pictures (hope the weather will clear so you can go out and take some more). What I’m not sure about is what point you are trying to make. Do you have any comments on the proposed wiki text?
I hope it’s OK if I move the proposed text to the main wiki page?
Here’s another nice picture of what I tagged as a bad trail visibility path. You can probably just see it leading to where my wife is standing, and that’s the better visibility part of it. It’s part of the E4 European long distance path (10.000+ km from Spain to Cyprus): it would be a pity if this part of it wouldn’t be on the map because the path is through grasslands and not very often used. It’s on the border from Bulgaria to Greece: left is Bulgaria, down below is Greece.
Not so sure either, about what point I want to make. First of all, I am not at all fond of the current documentation. The definitions read as made for backcountry backpackers. Excellent should have meant excellent from the start, not some dirt track. Good should not have allowed for gaps. This is just mocking consumers.
The saying goes, there is no bad weather, there is only bad dress - and the Greens are truly saturated still, so here - captured today, what I’d say is excellent visibility and hiking difficulty.
I see, the utilitarians here are in the majority. Still, please reword the text with the link to the “verifiability” page so that it means all of trail_visibility, not just the value no - This will never be science. Maybe just keep the current wording.
Do you mean “keep the current wording for the paragraph about verifiability” (but you’re OK with the rest of the proposed changes) or do you mean “keep the current wording for the whole page” (make no changes)?
Asking also because I’m not sure which of the two Andy is saying he’s in favour of.
(For what it’s worth, I would be in favour of the proposed changes and I have no strong opinions on the verifiability paragraph)
Then I’d made a different picture than the ones below - taken right at the point of the transition - standing on a small bridge over a drain, one looking forwards, the other looking backwards, camera position nearly fix.
