[Talk-us] Reference numbers to use for hiking trail route relations

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 5:48 PM Mark Brown <tj-osmwiki at lowsnr.net> wrote:

> I've noticed that the US Topo Maps are way out of date before - whole
> rivers have shifted since the version that displays on JSOM was last
> compiled. Still, like TIGER roads, it's better than nothing I guess.
>

No surprise. USGS was defunded in the G.H.W. Bush administration and hasn't
really done field surveys since.  The new US Topo series is based on
whatever databases they had or could get their hands on. In many places
it's missing even the railroads.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-there-no-power-lines-pipelines-libraries-trails-etc-us-topo-maps

Unfortunately, for political reasons, they've been forced to set themselves
up in competition with OSM even as they've come to rely on crowdsourced
data. As far as I can tell "The National Map Corps" (
https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/tnm-corps) hasn't really gone
anywhere. OSM, at this point, offers more 'bang' for the volunteers'
'buck'. (The big problem, from the perspective of any government agency, is
that OSM doesn't have enough administrative control; who's to say that the
mappers are trustworthy? They could put *any* sort of bogosity into the
map! And I had better stop myself before I veer off into saying something
political that I'll regret.)

In any case, we have better maps of Iraq and Afghanistan than we have of
our own country.

I got into this project because for too many areas near me, I couldn't get
decent trail maps - from any source.  The ones from the state were rife
with errors; the USGS topos were sometimes from the 1953 state survey; the
NatGeo trail maps were at an unusably small scale (1:75000 for a trail map?
Really???)  Now, thanks to many OSM volunteers, I can get reasonably usable
maps for many places where I hike. The state appears to have been
correcting its maps - and apparently using OSM to do it.  (I also noticed
that at least one USGS site uses OSM, properly credited, to produce its
index map.)

For all we bitch about the TIGER import, I'd probably not have joined
without it. I recall looking at OSM before that happened, and saying to
myself, "why bother? There's nothing there!"  Now I spend various odd
moments 'cleaning the cat box' after what TIGER left behind, but it was
indeed better than nothing.



> On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 12:14:35 -0700, stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Oct 15, 2020, at 12:06 PM, Joseph Eisenberg <
> joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Many of the old "pack trail" labeled features near my home-town are
> now overgrown and barely usable. I would be skeptical about the utility of
> this tag - mappers will need to survey the trail in person before
> suggesting that it is currently suitable for horse, mules or other pack
> animals.
> >
> > Right:  many "trails" labelled "Pack Trail" are either from a long time
> ago and/or mapped a long time ago.  I would be wary of the utility of this
> label on many maps, but that can be said of many labels on many maps,
> especially when they are older or specify an "older" aspect of a map label
> such as "Pack Trail."  This has an old-fashioned sense about it, as while
> pack animals on trails are certainly still used, it's safe to say far, far
> less than they were in the 20th (and 19th and previous) centuries.


Uhm, yeah.  About the only useful information to be gleaned is that such a
trail was once graded for livestock, so is highly unlikely to have rock
scrambles or difficult fords. (Nothing about what our friend Castor
canadensis might have done to it!)

Still, there's at least one group still organizing llama trekking in the
Adirondacks:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3HVYZTbQVTw/XuOGlHM3nTI/AAAAAAAAXOM/g1KTWlBPMng_xCRnmcEdcubJhBBx0M0oACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_0453.jpg



-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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