Points of Interest

My recent changes are more or less political. As always when it comes to presets, I will be accused to abuse my position as a software developer to influence the tagging done by mappers.

In the openstreetmap database, we have footway, cycleway and bridleway values for the highway tag for a very long time now. As they were not really sufficient to map trails in the woods, hills, or mountains, paths have been introduced back in 2007 to circumvent the limitations. During the introduction, it has been suggested that footways, cycleways and bridleways should be abandoned in favour of paths with some additional attributes. As many people objected, paths have been introduced and the other types are still “valid”.

This leads to the current situation where similar things are mapped differently. For example, a footway is tagged as

highway=footway

If bikes are allowed, a valid tagging scheme reads as

highway=footway
bicycle=yes


Unfortunately, this scheme does not really allow to map combined foot- and cycleways (as often found in germany). Thus some mappers use

highway=path
foot=designated
bicycle=designated

for such purposes.

As a consequence, we see

highway=path
foot=designated

as synonymous to

highway=footway


The three time-honoured tags still are very convenient to use, while the path tag combined with some additional tags is the more flexible one. I have no clear opinion on that matter, but I tend to sense that a single tagging scheme would be better when it comes to consumers (like renderers) of our data. If our editors were better and capable of hiding all the tagging stuff completely, I would clearly propose to abandon the legacy tags in favour of the path tag. But our editors aren’t, and mappers still must be aware of tags.

Besides the abovementioned tags, we also use

highway=track

sometimes accompanied by some surface or tracktype tags:

highway=track
tracktype=grade2
surface=gravel


This tag is for agricultural or silvicultural roads. Obviously the meaning of tracks, bridleways, cycleways, footways and the various flavours of paths is at least ambiguous. This sometimes leads to frustration of mappers.

Given the current tagging scheme, I do it this way:

• If, and only if it is a dedicated cycleway, I use highway=cycleway (footway and bridleway respectively).
• If it is a dedicated, combined foot- and cycleway, I use highway=path foot=designated bicycle=designated.
• If a path is not used (or usable) by 4-wheeled vehicles like cars or tractors, it’s a path. I add widths, MTB or hiking scales to my likings.
• Tracks are usually used by tractors. If so, it’s a track. I always add tracktype or surface tags, too.

That’s surely not a perfect solution, but lets me map most things i find accurately.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 19:52 and is filed under Openstreetmap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.