[Talk-us] Bike route relation issues

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi all,

I've encountered two problematic bike route relations in the US and 
would appreciate thoughts as to the best way to deal with them.

One is the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route:
	http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/3161159

The other is I-5 in Oregon:
	http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/69485

Both are tagged with type=route, route=bicycle, network=rcn.

In both cases they're not of the same character that one would usually 
expect from a long-distance RCN route. One is mostly unsurfaced and 
therefore requires a certain type of bike; the other is entirely 
Interstate and therefore requires a confident rider.

I changed the GDMBR to route=mtb (which is how it'd be tagged elsewhere 
in the world), but the original editor has since changed it back with a 
plaintive changeset comment in 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/27862412 .

The I-5 relation seems wrong to me (it's not really a bike route per se, 
it's an all-purpose route on which bikes are permitted) but I'm not too 
worried as it's easy to find its character by parsing the constituent 
ways, which are all (of course) highway=motorway.

But the GDMBR is very problematic in that many of its constituent ways 
are highway=residential, without a surface tag. Until these ways are 
fixed, the relation is very misleading and likely to break bike routing 
(which generally gives an uplift to bike route relations) for all apart 
from MTB-ers.

Ideally I believe it should be route=mtb, but the original creator seems 
hostile, perhaps for "prominence on OpenCycleMap" issues. (I've messaged 
him but no reply as yet.) There may, of course, perhaps be another 
commonly used tagging that I'm not aware of.

What does the community think?

cheers
Richard