[talk-au] US Trails Working Group

[Andrew Harvey]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2022 at 13:39, Tom Brennan <website at ozultimate.com> wrote:

> This is certainly a problem, and having walked in Utah, there are
> certainly some specific problems with walking off track there. However,
> it seems that land managers are looking at the threat without seeing the
> opportunity.
>
> Yes, unauthorised trails get publicised more quickly. But the flip side
> of this is that land managers can also identify unauthorised trails more
> quickly, and take action.
>
> Whether you agree or not, tracks can be "closed" in OSM in ways that
> make them less likely to be re-added to the map. Eg:
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/621392139#map=19/-33.62619/150.30906


This approach is undervalued in my opinion. The point of including them in
public maps to aid navigation is still important and for that reason I
would likely choose to still show these tracks on beyondtracks.com/map but
styled is inactive.

The way I see it, we have land managers with legitimate concerns of
"illegal" tracks appearing in OSM the same as authorised ones, and mappers
who can't tell on the ground which are unauthorised. There was a case in
Brisbane that came across the DWG desk, I asked if there was signage on the
ground indicating closed tracks and what's authorised, they came back with
georeferenced photos of their track closure signage at each point. That
made it easy to update in OSM with access and lifecycle prefix tagging.

I'm sympathetic to concerns that signage or barriers a landholder erects
are often vandalised making surveying hard, but this is solvable by more
documentation when it is installed (e.g. photos of closure signage) which
land managers can supply.
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