[Talk-us] U.S. Bike Route 76

[Chris Lawrence]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Spencer Riddile
<riddile_spencer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What would the advantage/disadvantage be of using a different network name
> ("usbrs" vs. "ncn") for U.S. bike routes.  The author of open cycle map
> would have to adjust their symbolization if we started using "usbrs".  Is it
> good to try to keep some international standard even though trail and route
> systems may be different in various ways.

The advantage is that "ncn" isn't the name of the U.S. bike route
system ;-).  Or, less glibly, the US Bike Route System isn't part of
the UK National Cycle Network.

But if other countries' mappers have also adopted ncn for their
top-level bike networks then the cart has already left the barn on
that, so it's not too important.  It just means that a programmatic
tool that extracts bike networks for a particular country from the OSM
data is going to have to be smarter than simply looking at the network
tag.

Using e.g. operator=usbrs or operator=AASHTO (AASHTO designates the US
bike route system) along with network=ncn would probably be the next
best thing.


Chris