On 4/2/2020 9:29 AM, Paul Johnson wrote:
On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 3:10 AM Andrew Harvey <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: My view based on current usage, reading of the wiki and general opinion is that highway=cycleway is meant for any path that is either designed/intended for bicycles or specifically designated (signposted) for bicycles, irrespective of if it's an urban track or mountain biking track. So a mountain bike track and an urban cycle track should both be tagged with highway=cycleway as the primary tag. surface= and smoothness= can help for both to help guide users on which kind of bicycle the track is suitable for, and mtb:scale=/mtb:scale:imba= are used to indicate this is a designated mountain biking track. highway=path is specifically for a general use / unspecified path, which a mountain biking track may be if it's informal/shared, but purpose built and signposted mountain bike tracks don't fall into that category. A similar thing applies to hiking tracks, sometimes they are designated walking paths so use highway=footway + surface + sac_scale, but sometimes they are just an unmarked or mixed use path so are highway=path + surface + sac_scale. This is also my read on it. But we also need more than just highway=path/cycleway and sometimes footway for bicycle facilities, there's a bigger hierarchy than this. Also seen a lot of situations where highway=cycleway_link would be handy.
Perhaps highway=mtbway, which would be to cycleway what track is to residential. It's ugly but it seems that a lot of people feel that highway=path is not an ideal tag for a purpose-built mountain bike trail. If highway=cycleway + mtb:scale above 1 is considered troll tagging, then maybe mtbway is worth considering. Btw, since the original example Phyks posted is one of mine, I can describe exactly how the tagging happened: - Noticing local mtb trails tagged as hw=cycleway (can't remember which ones exactly). - Reading the cycleway wiki page and seeing no counterindications to this tagging, concluding that a mountain bike is a bicycle and that trails primarily designed for mountain bikes should be cycleways. - Visiting this park and seeing from the park map and personal observation that some trails were primarily designed for mountain bikes. - Reading the park map where trails are described as "easier", "more difficult", and "most difficult" which I mapped to mtb:scale 0, 1, and 2 -- with a clear changeset comment that these values are guesses and should be revised by knowledgeable people. (I'm not a mountain biker myself; I walked these trails.) Is mtb:scale=2 correct for this trail? Maybe not. Maybe I should have mapped them to 0, 0+, and 1. Maybe they're all 0. But these ratings are kind of subjective. Could a general purpose bicycle handle this trail? I'm sorry to say that I can't remember. I'll survey again when I can, but someone experienced with mountain biking could probably do better. Jason
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