[talk-au] Deletion of informal paths by NSW NPWS

[Tom Brennan]

I agree that environmental preservation doesn't generally need to be in 
conflict with ground truth.

If an area of a park - or tracks - is closed by land managers, tracks in 
that area should be tagged accordingly.

By simply deleting tracks from OSM, mappers are more likely to add the 
tracks again when they come across them. If the tracks are already in 
OSM, but tagged so that they are not visible (and possibly with a note 
explaining why), then it's a lot clearer why they should not be made 
visible.

The vast majority of the tracks in say Blue Mountains National Park are 
informal (formed by bushwalkers over time). That doesn't mean that NPWS 
is going to close them. Heck, they even advertise many of them! NPWS 
themselves acknowledges that they don't have the resources to maintain 
even a small percentage of the tracks.

There are still some grey areas. I've occasionally avoided mapping 
certain tracks because I know it will likely lead to significant impact 
- hanging swamps, aboriginal sites etc.

But in general I'd map what's on the ground, as long as that's not 
conflicting with a land manager policy.

cheers
Tom
----
Canyoning? try http://ozultimate.com/canyoning
Bushwalking? try http://bushwalkingnsw.com

On 8/10/2023 10:17 pm, Ben Ritter wrote:
> I think we can assist environmental maintenance without compromising the
> ground truth value. They are not actually in conflict with each other.
> 
> In fact, I think it is *more helpful* to keep the highway features with the
> addition of the access tag and/or the lifecycle prefix.
> 
> Many OSM users are used to incomplete data, so if they saw an OSM map which
> didn't include tracks that they observe in the wild, they would likely
> assume the data is missing, not that there is a restriction on it.
> 
> With the aim of ensuring as many maps as possible indicate the closure, the
> existing lifecycle tag should be used, which is
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:disused:highway, instead of a new
> one.
> 
> Anyone publishing maps using OSM data while ignoring the access tag is
> being reckless, and should stop it. Deleting those features is not a
> solution in any specific case (this thread is case in point), or in the
> long term for the reasons above.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ben