[Tagging] The concept of "audience" (commuter, tourist...) in bicycle routing/neworks

[stevea]

On Dec 6, 2021, at 2:17 AM, Volker Schmidt <voschix at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think that we are mapping vague recommendations when we state that a route is for cycle tourists.
> Even though I can only speak for the Italian cycle routes and for Eurovelo, these are definitively nearly all conceived as tourism products. They are designed as such, they come with corresponding documentation. They are signposted on the ground.
> Admittedly, there are a few exceptions, which we try to correct, when we detect them.
> It is obvious that there will be cases where a scenic bicycle route is also at the same time an efficient and safe commuter route. Think of ex-railways or waterway sidepaths.

Volker, I both know what you mean and don't at the same time.  I do NOT know "one from the other" or "I have so much local practice doing this it comes naturally to me" about a sidepath or along a river.  I know as a bicyclist that river paths can offer nice, gentle biking (sometimes, if there is determination to make bicycling through a river path nice and "into existence..." not just "a dirt path of possibility").  As a mapper (of especially both bike and rail) I know a few things about a few things.  But I do not seem to automatically know what you mean and how you mean it.  What you think of obvious is something which once you explain to me makes perfect sense, but I've never put those pieces together before you mentioned it.  That's fine, there are new things, we learn new things.  Sometimes we get to sketch out smart methods to say this.  When elegant, that's nice.

We really do stretch and reach to one another here, even though we've enjoyed tea and cookies at my garden-side table while looking at international bicycle maps on a big screen!  (2013?)  I don't think our concepts and understandings are SO far apart, really I don't.

The concept of "cycle tourism" (versus other "kinds" of cycling) is not lost upon me.  We have it in the USA in a big way, (Adventure Cycling Association is a membership organization that promotes long-distance travel by bicycle, for example..."many billions are spent via bicycle tourism...").  However, I have not seen it explicitly "carved into" OSM (via a recent tagging proposal) the way it is being carved into in Europe recently.  I'm glad to see it.  I find the process fascinating as it unfolds.  It looks like it will be new syntax / tagging, I'm not sure what it is modeling (yet) from the real world.  OK, I'll learn.

However, "vagueness" about "how I think of bicycling and its networking, in my culture" and how you think about that seem distinctly different (and we're both reasonably smart humans doing our best to move things forward on these topics for many years).  Different enough we must slow down our language to a crawl until we very carefully use our words about this.  OK, let's do that.

I don't want to drone on.  JochenB is busy cooking things up and I think that is great.  I'm not a fifth-grader (say, 10-year-old) but sometimes talking to one another like we are isn't such a bad thing.  I might even be acting like a fifth-grader, for all I know.  I know this is a crazy mix of global linguistic judo what we shoehorn into tagging as we hash this out.  It's hard, tedious work, let's not mislead ourselves.

I usually start (when I am more-or-less forced to go back to a beginning) with "tagging what is."  As a signpost as a node is tagged and these suggest themselves to structure those nodes into routes and networks (I don't know how much of that has already happened or what its structure is, but I'd be willing to learn)...and we have a relational database.  I don't know how much of that is built, unbuilt or built-but-broken (confused, blurred-because-never-designed-very-well...).  I don't know how much interacts with tags on ways.  Any relational database (OSM included) has only a handful of primitives:  nodes, ways, relations, and let's say keys and values as a tag-pair applicable to all of those other three.  As long as "data utter what is" and humans understand as the data do so (while well-modeling the real world), I'm good.  I think we all are, but it can be difficult to arrive there.  I remain patient.  It may also turn out that so much "inside baseball" is going on (about how parts of Europe sign-and-map biking/hiking) that it becomes culturally impossible to define everything.  (Like defining "chair," which can become surprisingly difficult).  That might also happen.  Then, we shrug our shoulders.

You have "routes which are tourism products."  OK, that's not how I would say things (here in the USA), even though I agree your language is highly accurate (even here in the USA).  Our routes are a very different mix than yours, but there are such things (routes which are tourism products).  I don't urgently see the need to make fine distinctions, but if you do, OK, great, it's a worthy syntax to specify.  We might start doing that too (in the USA, more internationally), and you folks lead the way.  "Here are several different flavors of networks" (and how they are specified, maybe, and structured, maybe, off to the side) and "here's what we're going to tag them."  (It's the nuts-and-bolts "saying what these are" that we seem in the middle of).  I'd like OSM to denote these, as many do.  So, I listen, patiently.

A new thread is welcome, too.  Maybe this one is done.  Though, audience=tourist is one potential value.

I mean, a pub is not a restaurant is not fast_food is not a picnic_table is not a bar is not a nightclub is not a cafe.  If these "things" (define them first, please, then we might assign audience=* tags) are so unique, (but we already have route=bicycle and network:type=node_network to specify real things), another tag that makes a "flavor" of them, like audience=tourist...is there something terribly wrong with "a key-value pair that denotes who this thing (we already have) is targeted towards?"  It does make some sense.