[OSM-talk] tagging "unofficial" cycle routes

[Richard Fairhurst]

maning sambale wrote:
> In the Philippines there are very few (close to nothing I 
> know of) officially designated cycleways and routes.  However, 
> local cycling/mtb clubs have created/established routes for 
> their own purpose.  Any advice on how to tag these routes?

If they're not "on the ground" (i.e. signposted), then adding them to OSM is
getting perilously close to tagging-my-favourite-road territory - so I'd
hesitate before actually tagging them. By the same token, we don't tag CTC
routes (a national cyclists' organisation) in the UK, which aren't
signposted, but we do tag Sustrans ones, which are.

Two things spring to mind.

One is that (presumably) these routes have been chosen because of objective
factors - decent surface, low traffic, that sort of thing. This can all be
tagged. Then anyone is free to benefit from this knowledge by using a
cycling route-planner on the data.

Secondly, this is really prime mash-up territory, but the great flaw of the
traditional (Google Maps-like) mashup approach is that it doesn't interact
with the data in any way. It's just a bunch of pushpins and squiggly lines
sketched on top.

There is an opportunity for someone to write, even just as a proof of
concept, a mashup that actually links to the data. You can't easily do
"follow way 827364 then way 76354 then way 9876325", because way ids change
as people edit the data. But you _could_ do "follow unclassified road west
from Chadlington to Sarsden, then follow unclassified road south to the
B4450" - something that can be recreated on OSM data. The CloudMade routing
API might be suitable for this: effectively you'd be storing the route as a
set of instructions to the routing API, with sufficient 'via' points to make
sure the right route was returned.

cheers
Richard
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