[Tagging] Section numbers in hiking routes

[Kevin Kenny]

On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 1:46 PM Yves <yvecai at mailbox.org> wrote:
> While the original question was about a good tag to record the section number, whick look like a reference, I would be tempted to answer Jo that to know which country you're in, you should look at Your OSM Database!
> Joke aside, such a cross border route makes a good candidate for a super route.

On a cross-border super-route, the individual route relations could
have name=* in the local language. The super-route can have 'name:en',
'name:fr', 'name:de'¸ etc., and I'm guessing that the governing
authority of the super-route probably has a working language, and
'name=*' on the super-route can use it.

I've used super-routes a few times for more pedestrian reasons. (Pun
intended.)  They work well to organize things.  Often, there's a
natural break into segments, even if the segments are informal. That's
what I did with https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/919642 - cut
the route at the county lines simply because the tools were struggling
with a route relation having as many segments as it would have had
otherwise.   Increasingly, tools such as Waymarked Trails recognize
super-routes and do the correct hierarchical decomposition.

919642 also provides a worked example for having a route that follows
segments of other routes. In many spots in the US, pride of place for
naming and blazing belongs to the trail that was there first. so
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/111804369 bears the name, "Devil's
Path", not "Long Path", even though the Long Path is over ten times
its length. Sometimes that goes to absurd lengths: I understand it's
now been adjusted, but for decades,
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/389226405 was blazed as an approach
trail to the Long Trail, because the Long Trail was the senior trail.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/389226405 was blazed with the
red-disc-on-a-white-square of the Ramapo-Dunderberg Trail and not the
vertical-white-bar of the Appalachian Trail for the same reason.
(Today, the latter way simply bears both blazes.) Generally speaking,
the major long trails will be at least marked with their own blaze at
junctions and signposts, but may simply carry the reassurance blazes
of another trail. In the Devil's Path example, at
https://www.nynjtc.org/sites/default/files/u9655/946523_10200476422125507_495296326_n.jpg
you see the aqua disc of the Long Path nailed to the sign as an
afterthought. The red disk of the Devil's Path takes precedence. Along
the trail, rather than at junctions, you see just the red markers. as
at https://www.flickr.com/photos/ke9tv/14278888814