I'll say what I always say these days whenever this subject comes up :-) That is, I believe the "highway" tag should represent the physical surface, not the rights. My current views on this are:
highway=track - a dirt/stone track, theoretically usable for off road vehicles (though not necessarily any legal right) highway=path - a narrow path, typically with mud/stone surface highway=path; surface=paved - a concrete path typically used in urban areas, what most people are using "footway" for Then, the actual rights should be defines using foot, horse, etc. foot=yes has more or less become unusable, as different people mean different things, so therefore foot should be no, private, permissive (use granted by landowner) or designated (a legal right, such as a UK public footpath, or - though my knowledge of German or Swiss law on rights of way is not good - waymarked paths in Germany or Switzerland such as the "yellow diamond" routes in the Schwarzwald or the red/white waymarked mountain paths in Switzerland). As an alternative to foot/horse etc one could use the "designation" tag such as designation=public_footpath or public_bridleway, designation=cycleway for an official cycleway, or (at a guess for Switzerland, I may be wrong) "gelb", "rot/weiss" and "blau/weiss" for the different types of path with different difficulties. Things like highway=bridleway or cycleway I would prefer to see deprecated, and replaced by path/track with surface/bicycle/horse tags, though I still tag with them as that is the generally-accepted way of tagging bridleways and cycleways. Nick _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
