[wongarsu]

Looking at the places I'm familiar with, there's also a pattern of places like high traffic intersections (probably lots of people avoiding those?) and places with lots of foot/bike traffic, where people don't travel along the shortest path but along the most beautiful or the one with the slowest elevation change.

I guess there's lots of useful information for improving routing algorithms in the raw data. I too am skeptical about its usefulness for mapping.