[Talk-us] Mapping rail trails

[Phil! Gold]

* stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> [2019-07-11 17:38 -0700]:
> I know it seems "like it just makes sense" to combine Maryland and DC
> relations, but there are rather deliberate reasons to keep these
> separate.  One is state-level, the other is federal-level (is one), but
> the "state at a time for route relations" is a fairly well-established
> method of tossing things into buckets.  We do it with bike routes,
> motorways and more.

However:

The C&O Trail is contained within the C&O National Historic Park, which is
owned by the National Park Service, so it's all really at the same
(federal) level.

The "state at a time" pattern, as I have always understood it, exists to
keep vastly distant objects from being linked with each other.  It makes
it much less likely for someone, say, updating I-95 in Florida to get an
editing conflict with someone else who made a change in Massachusetts.
State borders provide convenient locations for the division of overly-lond
relations.

It's also a rule of thumb; I've seen plenty of cases where short distances
in multiple states are aggregated into a single relation.  (e.g. there's
only one relation for US 340, although it spans MD, VA (in two sections),
and WV.)

Since there's only a short section of the C&O Canal Trail in DC, I don't
really see the harm in putting all of its ways into a single relation.

-- 
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