[OSM-talk] Philosophy about Autorouting for Cyclists and new key class:bicycle

[Felix Hartmann]

On 03.05.2010 19:29, Richard Mann wrote:
> I think routers would be better served if we identify good through
> routes (ie the equivalent of highway=primary for motorists), and
> record them as relations, perhaps
> "network=lcn+status=unofficial+signposted=no". But Andy's a strict
> objectivist, which rather gets in the way of documenting this sort of
> approach.
>
> Richard
>
> 2010/5/3 Felix Hartmann<extremecarver at googlemail.com>:
>    
>> ...
>>      
Well that is a second topic we should attack. Say for Mountainbiking 
official routes are mostly for trekking bikes, and not for 
mountainbikers. That is the reason that on gps-tour.info and other 
portals, Mountainbiking is the leading sport for tracks. Furhtermore in 
many countries mountainbiking is troubled by legally gray legislation, 
where it makes fun (Austria, Germany, parts of Italy, ....). For street 
cycling routes are usally nice, but for mtbiking I couldn't care less of 
what is signposted. Additionally from legislation if you signpost a 
route, usually you are legally responsible for accidents if road 
conditions are bad. Hence noone want to signpost routes, because it 
would be too expensive to keep care of the ways and you have to pay 
expensive insurance (that is at least the case in Austria). So even 
places that make loads of advertisments for mountainbiking, will only 
officially signpost very few routes but put up descriptions of route 
proposals on their webpages.

As I laid out, highway=primary is also subjective only. But this 
subjectivity has manifested in most peoples minds.

My actual position on this is, I will write a wiki page, with a note to 
say bug off people against unofficial routes (because for mountainbiking 
they will in a matter of days be largely more than signposted routes), 
we will tag them route:unofficial:mtb=name and eveyone should give their 
favourite routes a hefty go. People are much more interested in nice 
routes than in difficulty, but according to tagwatch more than 25.000 
ways have mtb:scale information, compared with maybe 50 mtb routes.

If in OSM we really want to get in more mountainbikers, we have to start 
with unofficial routes. I will think about it for the night, and put up 
a wiki page tomorrow, put some notices on this on the big forums 
(hopefully they will get ~5000 pageviews, put them in my feedburner 
newsletter (1200 recipients) and as of next Friday render unofficial routes.

Once we have more than 500 unofficial routes (I'ld say this takes no 
more than 14 days), I will take out official routes form my maps, except 
if they are labelled with additional information to make sure they are 
not a trekking bike route labelled as mtb route.

If someone starts kicking them out, we could take out their submissions 
using a bot if they really feel like starting an edit war. It won't be 
much worse than in the Russian military discussion, will it?

I don't give a damn what Andy or some other people say. For me the only 
rule in OSM and that counts, is that as long as you're not destructing 
the work of others (like say you put in paragliding routes that make 
editing a pain for everyone else) or largely irrelevant data that 
clutters the database so it becomes unusable, just let them do it (hey, 
in Austria we likely still have 20% of data junk from plan.at, and I 
don't even want to start about the crap data in the USA). The amount of 
information is nothing compared to all the remarks by bots and editors 
or on imports. And the benefit of getting more Mtbikers is huge, as 
hikers will never map the outdoors thoroughly, they are simply too slow 
and don't get in deep enough to the backcountry. Also for them cost of 
maps is not so important, as they are usually fine with 1-2 maps for a 
week. A mountainbiker doing a transalp, on the other hand, either buys 
20-30 paper maps (not realistic), uses a copy of some Garmin maps he 
"finds" on the net (the forums about where to get Garmin maps have 
probably two to three times the traffic compared to forums with legal 
talk about Garmin GPS), downloads tracks from gpsies, gps-tour.info and 
Co, or and this is increasing steadily now, uses OSM maps (guessed 95% 
on Garmin GPS).

The big problem is, that there are very few mountainbikers on the ML or 
Wiki. Most of them got into OSM because they used the maps. One year ago 
the search for "Openstreetmap" in the huge French "Velo Vert" forum (I 
think it is amongst the top 5 sport online forums worldwide if judged by 
either traffic and registered users) and it turned out 1 single topic 
(and no the search was working, I rechecked with google. Mountainbikers 
got on very late, because 2 years ago it was openSTREETmap, and only 
once streets got covered, people really started to show interest to map 
the outdoors. Still nowadays we lack a lot compared to official maps 
that is needed for orientation, and their is ONE single point why we got 
so many mountainbikers. And that is specific information like mtb:scale 
AND autorouting on Garmin maps.

I mean if we need to win a vote on the wiki because someone thinks to 
have a vote, we will win it, because I am sure with not much effort we 
can mobilise 1000-2000 people to put down their votes if we make some 
drastic announcements on German, Austrian and Italian MTB forums (there 
is a nice example of a much smaller request for help on JOSM preset list 
that I started...). But I would prefer to not go down that way. Just 
like people are raging about wiki fiddlers and loose their interest, I 
think many are against the objectivity is everything fiddlers, that 
simply don't realise that most of the information in OSM is subjective.