Expanding on the discussion about attributes for trails. What's the current status of the highway=path mess? OSM is increasingly becoming more useful for forest trails than for car roads (for which other sources are usually more up-to-date, to be honest). But the default rendering doesn't differentiate between a forest or mountain path and a paved, combined foot- and cycleway in an urban environment.
Obviously we're not tagging for the renderer and the default OSM rendering is discussed elsewhere. But has there been any fruitful discussing on this topic that will help users to tag these clearly extremely different kinds of "paths" in a way that make them more useful for data consumers, as well as easier to differentiate for renderers? Sure, tags like surface, width, trail_visibility can be used. But in most cases, highway=path is used with no additional tag. The JOSM presets for foot- and cycleways use foot|bicycle=designated, but that doesn't necessarily tell anything about the surface or size of the path, or even its importance in terms of usage by pedestrians, hikers and cyclists. When highway=path was introduced, forest trails were not widely mapped and not the main consideration when introducing the tag as a way to deal with cases when footway or cycleway could not be used. I realize this topic has been discussed extensively over the years. But now more than ever OSM is becoming increasingly important for hikers, trail runners and MTB cyclists for whom a forest or mountain path is something completely different to an urban foot- or cycleway. /Daniel
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