[Talk-us-massachusetts] Peter Cooper's comments on roads on top of roads and viewing routes

[Alan Bragg]

Peter makes some good points. Viewing routes at osm.org is not easy. The
"layers" icon has some nice transport presentations but nothing for hiking.
There are a 11 viewing options at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Hiking_Maps where my favorite is
hiking.waymarkedtrails.org

There are a few places where you have to "walk on roads" to maintain
connectivity. For example: where a sidewalk
(highway=footway,footway=sidewalk) crosses a street (highway=footway,
footway=crossing) .
The Bay Circuit Trail route has many miles of  "road" connecting trails and
it's just assumed you'll be walking on the side of the road. When I hike
the BCT I add sidewalks if possible and use them in the route relation.

Thanks to Peter for pointing out the problem with the  Mid State Trail. The
JOSM validator reports  16 overlapping roads and 5 crossing highways. I
fixed a small section at
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=42.146254%2C%20-71.937767#map=17/42.14581/-71.93682&layers=D
The fix was tedious, splitting the trail sections and the road sections at
the corresponding nodes. And replacing the trail route sections with the
road sections.

Alan



On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 5:25 PM Peter Cooper Jr. via Talk-us-massachusetts <
talk-us-massachusetts at openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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