Interesting interpretation of history. Slightly different version: The path tag was introduced by people who couldn't deal with highway=cycleway being shared with pedestrians, and wanted something less mode-specific than highway=footway and highway=cycleway.
In practice, this use is fairly limited: highway=path has been used far more for unmade paths in field and forest. The footway/cycleway issue largely continues to be dealt with by the meaning of cycleway being a bit country-specific; in some countries highway=cycleway (in cities, alongside roads) means probably-not-for-pedestrians, and in others it means probably-for-pedestrians-too-so-cycle-with-due-care. Personally I use highway=footway+bicycle=yes if it's low quality and legal for cycling, and highway=cycleway (which implies foot=yes in the UK) if it's halfway decent for cycling. And highway=path in field and forest. Richard On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 9:48 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 2014-11-03 23:38 GMT+01:00 Mike Thompson <miketh...@gmail.com>: > >> Nearly all trails in this area have been tagged >> "highway=footway" although most of them are open equally to foot >> traffic and horse traffic. Any reason to leave them as "footways"? >> > > > You can (IMHO) change them to path. > > To give some historical background: initially there were only footways, > cycleways and bridleways in OSM, and the suggestion then was to use the tag > for the "higher"/"more important" means of transport and eventually add > additional ones (e.g. cycleway and foot=yes). Then it was argued that there > is no preferred/higher/more important means of transport on a general > purpose way for single tracked vehicles (nor is there on a shared > cycle-pedestrian way), so highway=path was introduced, allowing all means > of unmotorized transport equally by default and allowing to override the > exclusion of motorized vehicles (e.g. snowmobiles, motorcycles). > > This new path tag was designed so generically that it was in theory able > to replace the well introduced tags footway, cycleway and bridleway by > adding additional access tags to the path (e.g. path and foot=designated > equals footway). In practise people continued to use in these cases (way > dedicated to one means of transport) the well introduced simple tags like > footway, while they adopted path for ways that can be generically used or > that allow more than one means of transport equally (something like > highway=footway, bicycle=yes still has its place, e.g. for spots where > pedestrians have the right of way but bicycles are allowed when driving > carefully). > > cheers, > Martin > > > _______________________________________________ > Tagging mailing list > Tagging@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging > >
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