[Tagging] Planning route in the shade during hikes either in urban areas or forests

[bkil]

> - in case of placing lamps the goal is of
> making entire stretch of easy lit,
> something else happens in case of some
> weird plans or deep incompetence
>

Imagine that endangered trees can be protected in many places, so
trimming them is not allowed and they can thus grow unhindered. On
installation, the lamps provided enough light everywhere, but in a few
years, even the growth of a few branches that took a wrong turn could
block a significant portion of light.

> - lamps put light in one direction, not
> subject of rotation like most shades are
>

You are again not focusing on the problem at hand and what the
customer (map user) wants and what an MVP means.

> Mapping shade=* would require unusually
> complex conditional syntax and ridiculous way splitting.
>

It would not make sense to add it to such a level of detail. This was
only considered as a time saver approximation. If you want something
more precise, you should definitely go for full 3D.

An approximation and heuristics are only that: they help a hiking
router make you the decision where you should go if two roughly
similar lengths of paths both lead to the same destination, but one
path has shade=no, while the other one has shade=limited.

Also, if you are unsure, just don't map it. If it is clear that a
given path is never shade in the summer months around noon, why not
put something like shade=no on it? If trees completely cover a given
stretch of footway and provide shade during summer months for many
hours around noon, why not put something like shade=yes on it?

What if several possible paths/sidewalks/cycleways exist in the same
area and long stretches of them can be easily compared in some cases
and in case of one being clearly inferior, mark it with shade=limited?
In many company cultures (and many open and volunteer communities)
many code of conduct contain clauses to the effect of "trust your
peers that they can make educated decisions for themselves as the
mature adults they are". We are intelligent humans. Please trust
mappers that they can make usable decisions in fuzzy situations - this
is what differentiates us from robots. The map is made by humans for
humans.

> For what? In case of shade from buildings
> where shade depends on time of year
> and day I am curious how you would even
> tag using it with shade.
>

Not sure where you live, but in this region, heat is only problematic
in very specific months and very specific hours of a given day.

> In my area deciduous trees, changing
> sun location etc result in shade changing
> massively during year.
>

In my area, in the few months of the warmest part of the summer where
shading matters at all in real life, the sun shines in a well defined
angle and deciduous trees have their foliage on. I would be surprised
if you lived on a planet where this goes differently.

> - width of the sidewalk/footway
> Doable with measuring tape, though not
> sure why it would be needed
>

In order to see where people can walk exactly, you either need to map
the sidewalk as an area, or it needs to have its width=* added. In
case a sidewalk is added as a linear feature, it makes a big
difference whether the sidewalk is 1m wide or if it is 5m wide to see
exactly how far from a given fence or tree a router can make one walk.
Surely, I wasn't talking about marking whether a sidewalk is 1.10m or
1.15m.

> Tree size should be estimatable by measuring
> it's trunk diameter and species.
>

I've surveyed thousands of trees around the area, so I know exactly
how much work it is. It is unfeasible even for me, let alone laymen
mappers to do this. The godfather of the iD editor called me names
some years ago when I suggested that it should be possible to add the
taxon or at least the genus of a tree, reasoning along the way that
mappers aren't smart enough to tell apart an apple tree from figs (and
if some of them can, they should be denied the possibility to mark it
anyway just because).

Also, I'm not sure if you ever had a garden or been to one, but in
towns or gardens where they trim trees (basically in many urban
areas), the trunk diameter keeps growing annually, but the height and
the number of branches and the volume of foliage stays approximately
the same every year (along with its cast shadow). I'd say at least
half of urban trees are trimmed as a method of precaution. My
botanical observation tells me that weather, the genetic makeup of the
given individual, its health and life record can cause a lot of
variance in crown diameter and foliage density (along with accidents
in the past and trimming patterns), so I think the approximation based
on the trunk would only be useful in the wild and in a statistical
(population) context, not for such micromapping.

It would surely be better than nothing, but I think compared to how
much it would cost, just estimating the height and crown diameter via
various methods would be much more useful for this question.

> Mapping approximate height of building
> can be done by surveying.
> See StreetComplete
>

How many towns have you yourself drawn on an empty map, encircling
every structure and then walking through every street and adding the
height and shape of every building and fence? We regularly organize
parties over here where many do this, I have drawn towns from the
ground up and many 3D stuff, so I know exactly how much work it is (a
lot, hence I prefer not to do that any more). I see you have lots of
edits (mostly single changes, though, so I can't feasible review
them), but I don't know how much 3D you have done.

What you must understand is that unless you come over here and fill in
the map for us, it will never contain the needed information to a high
enough coverage that would make a service usable based on that. I
would guess that the situation is the same for most parts of the world
(especially where people walk and finding shade matters at all).

Hence you are basically saying that "if you can't do it 100%
precisely, don't do it!" or "you're either doing overtime and do it my
way or it's the highway!". This is toxic to the community.
Volunteering does not work like that. The world does not work this
way. People have needs, there are many viable and useful solutions to
their problems, and people will definitely solve their problems one
way or another if they need to be solved. It simply does not cut it
that naysayers say that they should not solve their problems.

> Still easier than mapping whether it shades
> road depending on time of day and year.
>> But how common is it that one would have all required data?
> More likely than mapping shade= in way
> that would actually work given that
> shade changes during day
> Single 10 storey building would require
> footways split every 10cm around it
> (towards East, West, North from it)
> or such shade=* tags would be useless.
> That sounds like horrific idea that should
> be considered as ridiculous, unusuable,
> not worth encouraging and bad idea.
>

Yes, I agree that your recommendation is ridiculous and unusable. Lots
of straw man arguments here - I'd prefer if we wouldn't do that.

We have none of this data available in the whole country as I have
already stated, and I have shared a possible way of approximate
surveying that takes a similar amount of time as adding interpolated
house number ranges - stopping for a minute at each street corner.
There could exist other approximations and many others ways to tag
such approximation as well.

It was suggested on our local list that even an average percentage or
expected probability of shade could be marked per longer stretch of
path. I think that would be more difficult to verify exactly, but this
also shows that we could come up with lots of useful methods for
approximation if we really put some effort and a positive attitude in
it together.