[Talk-us] OSM US Trails Working Group

Fri Oct 8 18:31:50 UTC 2021

I am a bit miffed that this discussion will be on Slack. OSM has way too many ways for discussions to be hidden from the typical mapper (should this be on one of a huge number of mail lists, on the help website, the forum website, slack, or ???). I guess I will need to join the OSM US Slack group as this topic is of interest to me.

For background, in addition to being an amateur mapper I am a volunteer with the US Forest Service and I make hiking maps with OSM data being one of the sources. Most of my USFS volunteer work is with an emergency response group so I have had quite a few joint training sessions with various SAR teams over the years.

In my experience there is quite a gulf between the desires and resources available to the entities involved. In a nutshell:

1. OSM’s philosophy is to “map what is on the ground”.
2. The land manager’s need to protect and preserve natural resources.
3. The land manager’s desire to nudge people away from dangerous situations.
4. A search team’s need to know all the places a missing person might have gone and the ways those areas can be accessed.
5. The companies and/or projects that create the actual maps or apps are not under the control of OSM or the land managers.

OSM’s philosophy encourages mapping of informal or social trails. But those trails may go through sensitive habitats or downright dangerous areas. If a trail is mapped in OSM some hiking app will show the trail. If the trail is shown on a hiking app then people will use it. That is not a good thing as it can do permanent damage or get people killed. But SAR teams want and need a map that shows everything in order to be effective in searches.

I suspect the partial solution is to come up with a tagging scheme that the land managers can assure is enforced on their land. This will require them to monitor changesets affecting their land and to fix them as needed to fit the agreed upon tagging. Note that they can’t just remove the trails as some mapper somewhere will add it back in. The next step would be to get the projects and companies that make hiking maps and apps for the general public agree to de-emphasize these trails in some way. In the extreme case just not show them. In a less extreme case show them but in a way that is less prominent than the official trails. Finally, projects like SarTopo that produce maps and apps targeted to SAR teams would show these trails.

But there is no way that any of this can be mandated or forced given the current structure of things. Which leads to my final thought: In addition to OSM mappers and land managers discussing this there should be representatives of the major hiking apps involved.

Cheers,
Tod

> On Oct 8, 2021, at 9:55 AM, Mike Thompson <miketho16 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In OSM we map what is actually on the ground, not what someone would like to be on the ground.  We are like "spatial journalists", and like journalists, we report (map) the facts (does the US Government try to tell the NY Times what to publish? Only in extreme circumstances.).  There will always be those who claim that the "facts are dangerous" and therefore should not be reported, and I am sure one can find isolated cases where this is true (this is not limited to trails or OSM, it seems that every few months there is a story of someone in their Honda Civic (e.g.) taking a "shortcut" that appears on their navigation app as a 4x4 road that only a rock crawler could traverse - no substitute for common sense).   But more often than not, the danger is to the particular group that desires these facts be suppressed.
> 
> If there really is a problem, land managers can post signs "no off trail use", "not a trail", etc., and enforce such.
> 
> I have talked to a number of search and rescue people that actually use OSM because it does contain so called "social trails."  It may also help legal land users remain safe.  A few years ago there were a number of deaths on Capitol Peak in Colorado because hikers had gotten off route.  I and another mapper added the "trail" to the peak to OSM (note, not NPS land).
> 
> In addition, my experience with the NPS trail data is that it is often in error, and they refuse to fix it, and even acknowledge that it could be wrong.
> 
> Finally, removing this valuable content from OSM will not achieve the ends the NPS and others want to achieve as it appears independently in a number of apps.
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 10:30 AM Zeke Farwell <ezekielf at gmail.com <mailto:ezekielf at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Recently a number of us attended the "Mappy Hour" presentation "Trails in OpenStreetMap <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXXGkBVJK-o>" by Keri Nelson of the National Park Service.  Keri described the damages our public land managers are seeing from visitors following informal/social trails and non-trail routes shown on popular hiking maps that use OpenStreetMap data such as AllTrails, CalTopo, and GaiaGPS.
> 
> This has initiated a public discussion on the OSM US slack <https://slack.openstreetmap.us/>  #trails channel <https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C1US5SFUH> on how to better support responsible recreation through OpenStreetMap.  OSM US is also forming a trails working group focused on these issues.  The group is made up of OSM mappers, trail map providers, and land managers.  The first meeting is next Wednesday 10/13.  Anyone who is interested in helping resolve these issues is welcome to join the discussion on slack <https://slack.openstreetmap.us/>, and/or contact Maggie Crawley <mailto:maggie at openstreetmap.us> to participate in the working group meetings.  We have also started a United States Trail Access wiki page <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Trail_Access_Project> to document this effort.
> 
> --
> Zeke Farwell
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