[Talk-us] September 11th National Memorial Trail is now designated

[stevea]

Attention bicycle route mapping enthusiasts.

https://www.911trail.org shows us that the September 11th National Memorial Trail ("9/11 NMT"?) is a 1,300 mile multi-use route (including bicycles) linking the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Flight 93 Memorial.

At https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Talk:United_States/Bicycle_Networks#9.2F11_National_Memorial_Trail_Route I welcome Discussion on how this best fits into USA's bicycle route networks in OSM.  It seems most natural to call this "quasi-national" (our fourth or fifth, depending on whether ISL is fully international or part USA-quasi-national — ISL's USA segment likely shouldn't be both).

Of course, our convention in the USA is that "truly" national routes are the numbered routes approved by AASHTO as part of the United States Bicycle Route System, which grows nicely both in the real world and in OSM.  In 2012-2013, OSM harmonized long-distance USA bicycle routes to also include major routes like East Coast Greenway and Mississippi River Trail as "quasi-national," so they are tagged and render as national routes (often rendered red or reddish as opposed to purple as regional or blue for local).  This seems to be working (and has for a decade or so), but as quasi-national routes have slowly grown, adding another one makes now seem a sensible time to ask for wider consensus that OSM categorizes these "properly" in a USA context.

We do (now, by convention / consensus) tag USBRs with cycle_network=US:US and quasi-nationals with cycle_network=US.  Because 9/11 NMT was declared by federal law (routes in the USBRS aren't, quite, though AASHTO is granted "authority" to do so exactly as it numbers Interstates and US Highways), we might want to tag 9/11 NMT with something like cycle_network=US:USA to indicate it was "passed (unanimously!) by both houses of Congress and signed into law as 'designated' by the President."  This really IS unique in USA national bike routing, as we've never had a "nationally designated" route like this.  I'm open to suggestions.

There is also a recently-discovered (by me, anyway) "lightly interstate" bicycle route known as "Great Lakes Seaway Trail" (New York, Pennsylvania to the Ohio line), not yet entered into OSM.  It seems this, too, could be called "quasi-national" (network=ncn).  A regional (network=rcn) route which might also become either quasi-national (it is fully domestic) or possibly international (tagged cycle_network=GLCT) called Lake Michigan Circle Tour — including its alternate segments — IS now entered into OSM, though the other four (truly international, i.e. traversing both USA and Canada) Great Lakes Circle Tour routes remain unentered into OSM (their data seem sparse / difficult to find / perhaps not current / not active / not relevant).

These are some minor upticks in / growth of our national(-ish) bicycle networks, is all.

Again, wider community discussion (syntax and naming conventions, cycle_network tagging conventions, route entry progress...) is welcome on that Talk page.  No rush, we're fine, this seems it's on a "slow simmer."

SteveA