[talk-au] Hume/Hovell route

[Steve Bennett]

Hi all, and welcome Mark to the Australian OpenStreetMap community!

(I noticed some strange edits that affected the Goulburn River High
Country Rail Trail so I sent him an email - he's now subscribed to
this list so I'll reply here)

>Thank you for your interest, comments and offer to help with this. Judging from your interest I assume you may have created the Goulburn River High Country Rail Trail (GRHCRT) in Open Street Map (OSM).

Yeah - although mostly I just converted an old train line that someone
else created into the rail trail. I've just ridden the rail trail this
weekend, so I'll probably tweak it further with the GPS trace from
that.

>Just some back ground to my efforts. I have an interest in cycle touring, the history of the early explorers and being a land surveyor I am interested in mapping. The OSM web site seems like the system to bring these together given the >Openmtbmap and Velomap derivatives of OSM.

Cool - I do quite a lot of cycle touring as well.

>Concerning changing the route relation of the GRHCRT to a different one, "Near to explorers route", the intention here was to create a completely new track being "Near to explorers route" (original explorers cross country route) with no relation to >the Goulburn River High Country Rail Trail at all. However, I did intend to create a new bike route being, as I have named it, 'Hume & Hovell Trail', from Wodonga to Broadford which follows parts of the GRHCRT. This Hume & Hovell Trail is >intended to be an extension to the Hume & Hovell Walking Track in New South Wales.

Here's where things get tricky. OSM isn't really the place for
inventing original routes and describing them. You really only want
bike routes that have some sort of external source, and preferably
local signage for them. Someone did something like this a while ago,
adding the "Golden Trail" cycling route from Robe (SA) to Bendigo.
That means it shows up on OSM like this:
http://osm.org/go/uGbaUo--?layers=C

But that's not really helpful to anyone: a route like that has no
signage, and is not especially suited to bikes. It's just one person's
suggestion of a set of roads to follow. If a few people did that,
pretty soon you'd have a big set of intersecting routes that doesn't
really communicate anything.

I think it's a cool idea to invent these routes and document them
somewhere - and I really hope there is a good way to do this that
somehow links with OSM. But actually putting them in the main OSM
database isn't right.

(By contrast, the GRHCRT has bike-specific infrastructure, local
signage, support from local councils, is documented on several
external websites, etc etc.)


>I did add a new route relation to the GRHCRT without changing the name of GRHCRT. The mapping tool (Potlach 2) of OSM appeared to let me do this and appeared to show both route relations when I actually made the edits, being GRHCRT
>and Hume & Hovell Trail, to the rail trail. As I am new to Potlach 2 I seem to have made an error with adding the new route relation, both judging from what you are saying and also I note now that the parts of the GRHCRT that I added the new
>route relation to are no longer showing in Potlach 2.

I also removed your relation from some of the GRHCRT sections - at the
time I had thought you had just made a mistake, applying the H&H
walking track relation to this bike path in error.

>I agree 'footway' is certainly not applicable for the cross country explorers route but I was unable to find an appropriate level from those available. I note your comment that historical data doesn't belong in OSM but I believe this sort of
>information makes maps valuable, providing it is made clear that it is a historical data. Compare with Hema touring maps of Australia which show explorers routes overlaid on normal maps.

This is probably a question to raise on the tagging mailing list. It's
an issue that gets debated in various forms. It depends a lot on
whether there is any physical manifestation of the historical event.
If you compare it with something like railway=abandoned, you can
usually find traces of the old train line - embankments, remnants of
bridges etc. But what you're talking about is simply the route that a
group of explorers once took when they travelled overland. Now it's
just farms, houses etc. So there's really nothing for anyone to see.
So, however you tag it (if indeed it belongs in OSM), you should
choose tags that don't show up in the default Mapnik render.

>I intended to make enquiries as to what would be an appropriate level for historical routes. I would like to show the original explorers route to show a geographic comparison with the Hume & Hovell Trail bike route.

I honestly think that probably this kind of data doesn't belong in
OSM, but hopefully some other people can offer opinions, too. Of
course, there's lots of other historical stuff that can be included
(ruins, old mine sites, memorials, graves, etc), if they have a
physical manifestation. If you have any GPS traces from cycle tours,
they're very likely to be useful.

Steve