[Talk-us] Per-State relations for the Appalachian Trail

[Elliott Plack]

I've been doing some mapping along the Maryland portions of the Appalachian
Trail lately and noticed many issues along Maryland's section as well as
nearby Virginia and West Virginia where the route relations were not
continuous or overlapped other states'. Strava's slide has been quite
helpful in this effort, as has my own walking of the trail.

This got me thinking, is there any specific need to have the route broken
up by state? Unlike interstate highways, where maintenance changes across
state lines, at the border, the AT maintenance is handled by a trifecta of
federal agencies and a non-profit. There are also 31 clubs that share some
of the maintenance on some sections.

Given that it is clearly a challenge to keep all of the routes in order,
would there be any objection from the community to combining all of the
relations into one single route? Any technical issues or limitations here?
I think that having one long relation would make the continuity easier to
manage. (And I could be wrong! If so, let's figure out how to manage the
relation together.)

I've also noticed that most renderers do not seem to consider the hiking
route, but rather the tags on the individual segments, thus adding to the
complexity of normalizing some of the tagging across the country.

Current super-relation:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/156553#map=5/45.587/-61.941

Thanks,

Elliott
-- 
Elliott Plack
http://elliottplack.me
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