Hikingmap Route
While curing some cold, I mapped a hiking route to make it appear on the Hiking and Bridlemap.
Hiking routes are created as a relation tagged as
type=route
plus
route=hiking
Further useful tags include
name=*
and
symbol=*
where the latter one is not a machine but human readable description of the route’s symbol. For OSMC, there’s a special tag which can be used to describe a machine readable symbol:
osmc:symbol=white:black:black_dot
More details are listed in the Wiki.
After creating the relation and applying the aforementioned tags, all ways belonging to the route are added. This often requires to split existing ways into smaller segments at crossings. Here’s an example where a hiking route following some tracks in the woods required to split a tertiary road:
Tertiary split to forma route
At more complex crossings, this can lead to a situation where you will get a lot of small segments. Things become difficult as soon as the way one needs to split already belongs to another route. The mapper then needs to ensure that the edit does not change the meaning of the original route.
A further issue are conflicts. During an attempt to upload the route I worked on, I got the following (german language) dialog in JOSM:
Conflict in JOSM
All in all, adding routes does not work straightforward, and I don’t want to mention editing routes. This is not the kind of stuff an average computer user will accomplish easily.
So here’s the heretic question: Why do we add ways to routes instead of nodes?
