[Talk-us-massachusetts] Bay Circuit Trail

[Peter Cooper Jr.]

On 6/1/2021 4:12 PM, Alan Bragg wrote:
> We have a fairly new and very active mapper who's been verifying  BCT 
> sections 11 & 12.
> He's piqued my interest in verifying what's in OSM.
> Currently there is one long Bay Circuit Trail relation with over 1,200 
> ways with many gaps and conflicts plus a number of smaller relations 
> corresponding to some of the available documentation.
> www.baycircuit.org <http://www.baycircuit.org> has maps and explicit 
> directions for all sections of the BCT.
> I'm creating relations for the missing sections and combining them in 
> superroute.
> If you're familiar with a specific section it would be nice to have 
> your advice.
>
> Note: the trail is not just a route from A to B. There are lots of 
> branches and alternate paths.

The only part I'm really familiar with is the area behind the Staples 
corporate offices (Staples Drive in Framingham 
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/42.2913/-71.4958>), where the 
trails are signed "Staples Fitness Trail" from the middle (on Staples 
Drive) but they're also somehow part of the Bay Circuit Trail "system" 
(and have the Bay Circuit Trail logo at the "trailheads" on Crossing 
Boulevard and Oak St. though they're small and easy to miss). A while 
back I updated that area somewhat and added the streams alongside much 
of it. I ended up leaving the "name" as it was of "Bay Circuit Trail" 
but adding an "alt_name" of "Staples Fitness Trail" for the portion that 
was gravel, but I'm not sure that that's the most correct approach, or 
maybe it should be the other way around?

The concept of these trail "networks", with the idea of "you can walk on 
car-roads to get from one woods-trail to another", doesn't seem 
consistently represented, at least for the two data points I know of: 
This Bay Circuit Trail uses the hiking route relation on both trails 
through woods as well as on "regular" roads so on the default rendering 
there's no easy way to see the trail as a whole (since only the relation 
has the whole picture), whereas the Midstate Trail seems to also have 
its highway=path go over the same ways as the regular roads for the 
places where there's no route through the woods. So, the Midstate Trail 
(at least through near where I live) has these double-labelled areas 
where a road both has its normal name as well as the name of the "trail" 
that goes over it. (See 
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/42.1374/-71.9213> for what I 
mean.) My understanding is that this two ways over the same place is 
"wrong" (or at least iD complains about it), but I'm hesitant to change 
it unless the only-a-relation approach is definitely better (and I'm 
unlikely to have time to actually work on "fixing" anything regardless).

And I know the "what does the default render show" isn't the best 
approach for "what should the database have", but it makes me think that 
something somewhere should do a better job of showing these larger trail 
networks and how they interconnect, if not on OSM's default render 
proper then somewhere else. The generally-useful 
https://www.mass-trails.org/ site takes a very property-by-property view 
of "hiking areas", with these trails like Bay Circuit Trail and Midstate 
Trail that go "between" hiking areas being much harder to find there.

-- 
Peter