I’d be interested to know what people are using to tag soft and boggy paths, particularly with a view to suitability for cycling.
In the uplands of mid-Wales, there are numerous paths which are legally accessible to bikes, but in practice are very hard going even on a mountain bike.
Often these have a soft surface which is ok for walking (assuming you have good boots), but a bike will just sink into it. It might be obviously boggy/wet, or it might be more “tussocky” - “a compact tuft especially of grass or sedge, also: an area of raised solid ground in a marsh or bog that is bound together by roots of low vegetation”.
Here’s some example reading:
- The Monks' Trod on Waun Bryn-hir © Richard Law cc-by-sa/2.0 :: Geograph Britain and Ireland
- Bridleway heading over Cistfaen © Nigel Brown cc-by-sa/2.0 :: Geograph Britain and Ireland (note that the caption says “very easy going” - on foot yes, on a bike no!)
- https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/elan-valley-request-for-a-bit-of-local-knowledge/
- https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/monks-trod-near-rhayader/ (“It took us all day, brakes and carbs freezing. Like Stalingrad without the bangs”)
There isn’t an obvious surface tag value. mtb:scale is more about technical ability - obstacles and gradients - than about paths which are just difficult going by virtue of their surface. Similarly tracktype and smoothness are mostly about the roughness of the surface. I’m a bit stumped and I suspect most other mappers are too, as I haven’t seen anything widely in use for this sort of path (in the UK, at least).
Any suggestions?
11 posts - 8 participants
Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/soft-and-boggy-paths/8429