Couldn't see more than the headline behind the paywall but I 100% getcha on the bike/horse rivalry. I seem to remember there not being any no-bikes signs until the pavement stops and it becomes very clearly a bridle path, but better to play it safe. Horses and pedestrians it is!

Hey! Every time I've been to this section of trail, it's been open to at LEAST foot traffic, if not bike and horse traffic. I understand that there may be plans to make it lit and fancy like the rest of the bike trail, but for the time being it seems perfectly useable as a mixed-use trail. (And it seems like it's been waiting for the upgrade for over a decade so maybe they've abandoned the plans and just let the mixed-use trail stand?) I'll make sure to go back there and check the signage to confirm before changing anything since it's been a couple months, but I'd propose opening up the access tags to at least designated if that sounds ok to you?

Oh that Achavi thing is super neat, thank you! And yes, sorry, I conflated LA and LA county in my memory of when it became legal but fear not, I read all that mess about how all the different cities do it haha.

From the first link you sent it seems like if I move forward using the path tag but do my best to be specific about access tags, I should be in the clear? Seems like they're saying there is no consensus on good assumptions - so in my mind the answer is go literal: if it's not just for foot it's not a "footpath". Especially considering the default tags for "path" include bicycle=yes and for footpath they include bicycle=not specified.

Oh, and I'll try to do surface if it's super obvious but I haven't done much diving into the different surfaces yet so it seems daunting when I'm trying to get these paths constructed

Oh man, I definitely thought the greyed-out tags were essentially applied for most practical applications! Oops. The app I use that interacts with OSM uses the assumed tags in most cases and very specifically names the cases where it requires the tags to be actually set - I guess it's a little fancier than most? Seems strange to have the different types of paths with their default tags if the default tags aren't applied!

I've been going with a lot more highway=path (especially over highway=footpath) ever since I learned that LA changed the law to allow bikes on sidewalks and other traditional footpaths. It seems better to me to keep the delineation between a designed cycle-and-foot-path and a path where cycling is allowed but wasn't considered in building the path - and for the purposes of the app I'm using, highway=path will add it to the cycle map whereas highway=footpath won't. Then again, if I start taking the time to name specific permissions, I think that would probably overrule the filters for type of path.

In the case of the bridge and the path it connects to, as an example - it didn't show up for cycling in my app (or for walking, actually, due to one of the specific filters for random "highway=footpath"s), but if I'm correct it will once the map updates later this month. (I actually will learn quite a bit about how effective my editing has been after the next update - some of my work made it into the last one but the majority will hit this next one. Maybe the default tags don't work as I thought!)

As somebody who lived in Chicago for a decade, referring to it as a "not-growing urban population" is the most tactful way I've ever heard somebody say "nobody wants to live in Illinois anymore" 😂😂😂

I was about to do an edit on the track but since I see who made the most recent change I figured I should ask the master first! I was going to add the highway=path tag back in addition to the leisure=track tag a) so that it appears on the wandrer app as a valid footpath - wandrer doesn't include running tracks since I imagine most are not part of the network of paths and/or aren't that accessible, but this is more a dirt road in a park than that kind of track and b) because this wiki entry seems to say both should be used if I'm interpreting it correctly? leisure=track

Lemme know what you think!

I'm planning on scouting all these Whitnall Highway parks and other areas under the power lines and getting a good GPS trace since I seem to remember lots of unmapped paths from the last time I was in the area (before I edited OSM) and I'm not seeing them in the aerial imagery

Happy New Year! I'll delete tags on Sylvan and Bellingham - though I was wondering - on Bellingham north of Victory, there's a "no-left-turn" out of the former part of Valley Plaza that's now mostly a strip club. I tried to make Bellingham all one continuous feature like I did with Sylvan and it kept rejecting me, apparently because of that turn restriction. I removed the turn restriction and merged Bellingham into one street, then re-added the turn restriction......and it seems like it split the street in two again. Is this by design? Is there a better way?

Thanks, again, for all your help.

Hey thank you again for the tip! I'll realign the buildings I added and edited to match the surroundings. I kinda figured since they were added en masse they'd all have to be "fixed" at some point to match the satellite imagery and I was doing something helpful, but what you're saying makes perfect sense!

To that point - when I'm using GPX data from a hike/bike/etc that I did, I have been trusting the satellite imagery over my GPS when they don't exactly line up - is it better practice to go 100% with the GPS? Or to lean more toward the GPS? Is there a preferred non-default image source?

Apologies for the mistake! I think this was my first time changing anything anybody cares about instead of, like, the access tags on 5-foot-long pathways! I should have figured there was a reason it was the way it was. Before I went back to confirm the buildings were behind the gate and made this change, I had previously changed the pathways in that garden to access:private, is that ok? I'm new and coming from wandrer.earth, and the pathways in that garden are considered part of the total mileage of foot-accessible streets/paths in Toluca Lake, which makes completing Toluca Lake impossible without getting into Universal. Hopefully marking them as not public property was a better fix (and I should have quit while I was ahead)?