[Talk-GB] Public Rights of Way

[Godfrey Bartlett]

Hi,

Some advice would be appreciated.

My main interest in OSM is attempting to map public rights of way in the 
countryside such as bridleways and footways. I have read advice that a 
way such as a cycleway should only be mapped if someone else can verify 
its existence somehow – such as physical signs on the route. However, as 
anyone knows who has tried to follow footpaths in the countryside, many 
PROWs have no visible presence at certain times of the year – after 
ploughing or sometimes through fields of tall wheat or rapeseed. There 
are often no field edge markers which indicate which route you are 
supposed to take. If you are lucky, those who have gone before will have 
started to make a trail across a newly planted crop, which then tends to 
become the accepted route for that part of the footpath. Very often 
walkers consult their Ordnance Survey map before they strike out across 
an unmarked field, although the OS map may not be up to date with the 
legally-binding Definitive Map held by the County Council.

So hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. I want to represent 
ways with a legitimate “foot=yes” tag. In the absence of signposts, in 
practice the guide for UK walkers is the OS map, but if I walk a route 
which I believe follows the OS map for the purposes of a GPS trace, is 
this not using derived-data? Many people will walk round field-edges 
where they find the PROW blocked by impenetrable crops – but the 
arbitray nature of this clearly makes it unsuitable for OSM. If you 
don't map bits of a footpath because of lack of signposts, then 
foot-routes between villages etc lose their function as a route, and 
become disconnected isolated snippets of path, which seems to me pretty 
pointless mapping.

Is there a solution to this?

User: Qichina