[Talk-us-massachusetts] Bay Circuit Trail

[Greg Troxel]

"Peter Cooper Jr. via Talk-us-massachusetts"
<talk-us-massachusetts at openstreetmap.org> writes:

> 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?

How I see that logically is that there is a trail "Staples Fitness
Trail" and that this trail is included in the BCT.   So both names apply
to some segments.

So I would put the Staples name on the ways, or on a relation with just
those ways, and then the ways should also be included in a BCT relation.
Thus there are two names, one on each relation, but the relations have
different membership.

This is just like Route 2 having a lot of segments and some of them are
also called Massachusetts Avenue.

> 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).

I have actually walked that section!

I think it's wrong to have a path to cause the label to exist on the
renderer.  On that road, you just walk on the edge, and there is no
physically spearate path.

So indeed I would say the extra paths removed and the roads included in
the relation.

That doesn't label them as midstate any less in the database.  It's just
not abusing the default render by having fake data.

> 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.

I completely agree that a render that is trails-first vs roads-first
would be a good thing.  The default render really can't emphasize
anything, and the maintainers seems to have little interest beyond "a
generally useful map for normals". Probably this is wise.

Both CyclOSM and Cycle Map on the main osm.org page (as alternative
layers) render the route as a line, but I'm not sure if that's due to
the same abuse.

There is hikebikemap.org but it seems out of date, and doesn't seem to
show the route (it may be an EU thing really).

The bike routes do show up on the cycle layer; it seems that someone(tm)
just needs to construct a hike layer.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/42.4916/-71.4183&layers=C

The mass-trails site does have a 'statewide trail map':
  https://www.mass-trails.org/map/ma2.html#map=12/42.14534/-71.92260

but it too may be responding to the mistagging.

Definitely nothing is easy about this....

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