Some time ago I used animal:highway=path + animal=deer in an area where these animals abound, though never seen any of them – they are quite shy, talks with the hunter and game_feeding POIs reachable from these paths enforced me. As deer travel in hordes, the trampling can be observed with trail_visibility=excellent 
I did not map that though, perhaps I should have.
We’re not referring to small updates to wiki pages, which make up most of the changes, but rather a significant overhaul of an important tag page—and that, unfortunately, takes time. Without proper discussion, a change this big is likely to lead to an edit war.
The point is that the Wiki is not the primary content here. The Wiki is the non formalized description of the OSM Databases content and tries to built a global understand on how to interpret the data in the Database.
So by design OSM can not be the fast moving target e.g. Wikipedia may be. We need to assess whether changing a definition in the Wiki still matches the real world interpretation in the database. And the larger the description is in the Database the harder it will get to change meaning of that.
Otherwise we could today simply redefined highway=motorway as for pedestrians only and be done - because - we are a fast moving efficient project.
Unless we (a majority of mappers) agree on how to tag/describe the real world the Database could also be filled with random gibberish stuff.
And this is also the reason we should NOT invent new high level tag values as in other threads e.g. “motorcycleway” - We should stick to verifiable physical or legal aspects. E.g. dont invent a “motorcycleway” which may be redefined later, but stick to physical aspects e.g. “width=” or legal aspects “motorcar=no”.
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That last paragraph lost me… Are you saying we shouldn’t create any new top-level tags (hello highway=busway) just because we’re afraid they’ll stray from their intended use?
Also, it seems like you missed the highway=motorcycleway proposal – probably because it doesn’t exist yet
Following your logic, I might as well start a proposal to deprecate highway=footway/cycleway/path/bridleway/pedestrian and have mappers “stick to physical aspects” together with highway=residential/service/track.
Based on your reasoning:
- A narrow footpath leading to house fronts will be then tagged as
highway=residential + width=1 + access=no + foot=yes. - A narrow hiking trail will be tagged
highway=track + width=1 + motor_vehicle=no. - A pedestrian road would probably be tagged as
highway=residential/service + motor_vehicle=no - A cycleway would probably be
highway=service + width=x + access=no + bicycle=yes.
Are you suggesting we go back to the basics and use only
- point
- line
- area
and add everything else in sub-tags?
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Nice! I would use colour=* as a first subtag, to get a nice look on the map.
Then:
- object_class=natural|landuse|man_made|…
Broken down further by:
- natural=*
- landuse=*
- man_made=*
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Yes, and, to simplify further, a line is a collection of points and an area is a collection of lines.
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I like where this is going. I support this proposal.
I don not agree with this. Maybe both. But a tag need a defined meaning otherwise we can write everything into a single description field.
We should not invent new stuff for stuff we already can describe perfectly well.
Especially new highway= tag values which only differ by some implicit access tags.
We do have tags for explicitly describe physical and legal attributes of a road.
Flo
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As it seems a consensus was reached, I edited the wiki as I suggested above (including the cleanups I mentioned above in separate edits). If anybody still disagrees, please do not revert but instead suggest changes or further refine it. I think it has been discussed quite a lot :-).
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I did not follow this thread completely.
Could you please summarize the result here?
Well, I put a proposal here: Wiki edit Footway vs path - #57 by supsup
and people who voiced the objections liked the post. I tried to incorporate all the input.
Thanks, understood:
So if I have a way in an urban area, designated by sign for foot and bicycle with equal priority
- highway=path +
- foot=designated +
- bicycle=designated +
- …
is still OK!?
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I think you are covered by this:
- For ways closed to cars but open to motorcycles, cyclists, horses or other users without clear primary user, use highway=path with appropriate access tags.
I think it is a terrible idea instead of "highway cycleway + foot=designated + bicycle=designated, but, oh well :-).
If you want, you can specify that it can be closed to motorcycles, or one could add a special case fo such paths, I think it is clear anough.
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I would actually remove motorcycles from that sentence because by default highway=path only authorize non-motorized vehicles (hence the required motorcycle=yes for motorcycle legal paths).
The wiki definitions are clear, a main usage must exist to pick a more precise highway tag, otherwise you will end up with mappers fighting over footway vs cycleway
Yes, the Wiki definitions are clear but they don’t tell the full story.
highway=cycleway foot=designated is an extremely common way of mapping shared-use infrastructure - and so is highway=path bicycle=designated foot=designated. Which one is predominant varies hugely by country.
The Taginfo numbers give some idea. There are more (726K) highway=cycleway foot=designated in the data than there are highway=path bicycle=designated (644K). (Taginfo doesn’t let you check how many of those also have foot=designated but I would think many.)
In Germany, it is 40K highway=cycleway foot=designated vs. 298K highway=path bicycle=designated.
In the UK, it is 69K highway=cycleway foot=designated vs. only 13K highway=path bicycle=designated.
I suspect that, as so often, the Wiki page you’re looking at was written by someone with a desire for clear definitions, who didn’t care as much about describing how data is actually tagged. Or maybe they didn’t know, if they were used to the German tagging style.