Proposal:Route=mountaineering

route=mountaineering
Proposal status:	Draft (under way)
Proposed by:	One half 3544
Tagging:	route=mountaineering
Applies to:	/
Definition:	Mountaineering route
Statistics:
Draft started:	2026-03-29

Proposal

The route=mountaineering tag is to be used to mark a mountaineering routes, i.e. a climbing route in the mountains, that generally leads from the bottom to the summit (or to some other prominent mountain feature like a saddle/pass)

Naturally, it should be applied to either ways or relations (consisting of ways that constitute the route).

Rationale

It seems that the currently-widespread approach of tagging mountaineering routes (where there is no visible path at all) with highway=path + trail_visibility=no has a huge disadvantage of misleading the map users - people generally have common sense approach to the map data and expect something walkable when they see highway=path. So, such usage is basically [tagging for the renderer] and is a misuse of the trail_visibility=no, which was meant to be a routing aid for short sections of the real paths, that aren't visible due to e.g. going over a scree (such tagging relatively is ok)

Comments

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