[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - value 'basic_network' for keys 'network:type', 'lcn' and 'lwn'

[stevea]

A true story, it's kind of long (apologies) and if you've heard it before [1], apologies for that, too.  Around 2010-11, bicycle route relation entry in the USA had become a "messy sandbox" of really wild speculation.  A couple / few people on talk-us (including me) sought to do something about this.

What emerged (2011 or so) is that an "architect" of the better-emerging national bicycle route System here (USBRS) [2] and I collaborated on how to remedy this:  he explained to me the process of how new national bike routes emerge at the state and "federal coordination of national networks" levels, and I began to document this in our wiki while at the same time developing a "let's do it like this from now on" methodology for how to enter these routes into OSM (again, documenting in the wiki not only how we were / should be doing this — rather prescriptive initially, but becoming more and more descriptive as time went on).  The wiki also served as a kind of "progress status report" with red / yellow / green color-codings of any given routes' progress at entry into OSM.  While an aspect or two (what is meant by a "proposed" route...) of this initially confused people, over time (months, a couple of years) people saw both how it was emerging and could roll into OSM being a solid representation of the System as a whole as it developed and grew.  Really, OSM helped the USBRS become stronger, AND vice versa.  Win-win!

There were problems to solve which seem somewhat similar to what is being attempted to solve in Germany and Western Europe right now for similar questions:  How does OSM tag / enter "rich bicycle routes and networks" that don't seem to fit into existing hierarchies?  For example, we had an emerging national (numbered) network of routes that we wanted to "get right" (and eventually did and now have), yet we also had / have other sorts of "national scope" routes (thousands of kilometers long, these couldn't be ignored!) that were not part of the newly-emerging numbered system.  On top of that, there is an organization (Adventure Cycling Association) which publishes its OWN (proprietary, commercial, copyrighted...) routes which even though OSM's ODbL doesn't legally allow these couple dozen routes to enter OSM, segments of them had done exactly that.  (OSM Contributors had ridden these routes, collecting GPX data on their GPS', giving them legal nexus to "own" those data, thus creating a legal loophole for them to enter the route data into OSM).  Messy indeed!

What was needed was to "invent" categories for all of these, but hopefully ones where the existing cycling tagging schemes (and admittedly, renderer — the only game in town at the time was OpenCycleMap) mimicked and well-mapped (logically mapped) onto these tagging schemes, harmonizing with their (existing) wiki tagging and hopefully rendering "nicely" rather than as confusingly and very wrongly as they were rendering at the time.  The cycle_network=* tag also really helped here:  it categorized routes as belonging to either "this, that or another" network, when before, the concept of "which network?" was quite fuzzy.

We (I, initially, but with a fair bit of ongoing feedback over the course of 18-24 months in 2012-4) ended up inventing a "new category" of bike routes around here to accommodate all of these which we called (coined, really) "quasi-national." [3].  Long story short, this "invention" and creation of "which buckets of hierarchy category to throw unusual / new sorts of routes into" worked, and it continues to work today.

I believe that the 'basic_network' being proposed is the solid foundation upon which a similar sort of tagging scheme now emerges in Europe.  Crucial for its success (in my opinion) is for it to be as clearly articulated as possible, so that it can be perfectly understood in cultures where no such thing at all exists presently, difficult as this is.  This understanding must also logically map to a very clear tagging scheme, hopefully one where all present cases are correctly handled and also allow room for growth / expansion into a future of new members of the hierarchy (new routes in new networks).  I knew that the creation of a category of "quasi-national" bike routes in OSM (and putting the very few ACA routes into the hierarchy at the regional level, when national seems more appropriate, to avoid confusion with the quasi-national routes) would seem strange to others not in the USA where we have these "odd" categories of routes, but I kept the two simple implementations of "put the non-USBRs but national-scope routes at this new quasi-national level" and "put the apparently-national (but proprietary and shouldn't even BE in OSM) ACA routes at the regional level."  Why?  Because it was as simple as possible, given the complexity, therefore documentable AND therefore widely UNDERSTANDABLE.

Keep It Simple is a very important concept because it often works as well as anything can.  As the very rich bike routes and networks emerge (well, they are already here!) in Western Europe, what OSM needs is "proper categorization" and tagging which maps (logically) to exactly those categories.  Extremely beneficial is if these categories "well map" to how existing renderers already do things, as even though we are admonished not to tag for the renderer(s), that really is how people understand their tagging to manifest itself in our map (products):  if you can see it rendered, it makes a whole lot more sense than to "simply" be "tagged as we say it should be tagged."  Maybe existing renderers (and tagging) hierarchies are respected, maybe they are "stretched" a bit "to elastically fit" the newer semantics.  We can do that, we've done it before.

The efforts to do this are well underway, that's great to see.  Please take the fruits of this story to heart and glean what can be learned from it, as it really has worked well for us in the USA.  Of course, your results will be different, but what is important is that they WORK and that they are UNDERSTANDABLE by those of us in the rest of the world.  If they widely render, even better.  Good luck and I watch with fascination and awe at this process!

SteveA

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.us/2021/08/usbrs-project
[2] https://wiki.osm.org/USBRS
[3] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States/Bicycle_Networks#Quasi-national