Author: tom[at]compton.nu
[Added to the original trac issue at 11.23am, Wednesday, 13th August 2008]

Punting to Steve, but highway=path is extremely contentious and I for one do not agree with it. I can't see much sign of agreement on the talk page for sac_scale either so I'm not sure how it got approved - there doesn't seem to be any actual vote on the talk page at all.

Author: mariner
[Added to the original trac issue at 10.59pm, Wednesday, 13th August 2008]

Replying to [comment:1 tom[at]compton.nu]:

Punting to Steve, but highway=path is extremely contentious and I for one do not agree with it. I can't see much sign of agreement on the talk page for sac_scale either so I'm not sure how it got approved - there doesn't seem to be any actual vote on the talk page at all.

highway=path may be contentious. But I'm talking about alpine regions, please consider this. There are a lot of tracks out there, may not growing to much because it's not get rendered.. It's a part of the world where teleatlas and the others never will go on a mapping tour. so a place where OSM can show how good it is.

if you want to see the voting of sac_scale have a look here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Approved_features/Hiking

Author: Mueck
[Added to the original trac issue at 5.23pm, Tuesday, 2nd September 2008]

from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Tag:access%3Ddesignated : "This tag indicates that a route has been specially designated (typically by a government) for use by a particular mode (or modes) of transport."
In civilized areas highway=footway (as highway=path foot=disgnated) are paved or a good sort of unpaved, can be used for nearly all weather conditions and have a usefull width. But there are also some trails/dirty tracks (Trampelpfade) inside or outside areas with buildings which have bad sort of unpaved, not good for every weather, small width and mostly not designated for pedestrians, horses or bicycles by government, but are used from pedestrians with their dogs around the city :-)
For such bad "footways", that should not mixed with good ones, I'm waiting for the rendering of paths without any designation, e.g. like footway/cycleway/track in grey instead of red/blue/brown.

Author: math1985
[Added to the original trac issue at 10.34pm, Saturday, 29th March 2014]

This has been implemented a long time ago already.