highway=ford symbol shows car even on highway=path

There are a couple of bits to this question - how best to map fords and how the "standard" map chooses to display them.

On the "how best to map fords" question, historically "highway=ford" was used on both nodes and ways. This was problematical on ways because what sort of highway it was (tertiary? footway?) was lost for the "ford" part. The solution to this problem was to tag a ford way in the same manner as a bridge, using highway=blah, ford=yes.

The second issue is that the "standard" map renders "highway=ford" with a symbol containing a car, for example here, and doesn't render "ford=yes" at all. The reason for that is that no-one's yet made it do any different. Requests for changes to OSM components are made via trac, or in the case of the OSM "standard" style Github, and there are at least a couple of relevant old trac issues - 2944 and 3007. Unfortunately the database that the "standard" map is created from is optimised for rendering and doesn't contain all data, so requests of the type "can't it just display X?" are not as simple as they might seem.

Finally, where we're just talking about nodes where a highway intersects a waterway, I'd disagree with the "highway=ford" wiki page where it says "This tag is deprecated". There are almost no deprecated tags in OSM, because you can use any tags you like. Certainly, data consumers looking for fords will need to look for both "highway=ford" and "ford=yes" - according to taginfo there are around 9000 of each currently. Changing all of one type to the other overnight isn't practical for a couple of reasons:

1. because there isn't currently an effective way of telling all data consumers to stop looking for the "old" tagging and start looking for the "new".
2. in the case of "highway=ford", a survey would be needed in some cases to determine the highway tag.