Hi Folks, In this case I would again defer to the locals who are working with the local land managers.
Some of the tracks in question have been closed for years and its likely in the case of any search and rescue then the same people who removed the track would be called in to assist (at least in Australia). You also will not see them if doing a desktop edit from aerial imagery. Having worked in this field in Australia for over 30 years most of your arguments do not hold any validity in a real world sense (in Australia), it may be different in other parts of the world. In most cases you are allowed to legally travel ANYWHERE, including off track, within a national park (with minimal exceptions), however we do not mark on the map every possibility between all known destinations. That would make the map look like a spiders web. This would also not help search and rescue efforts. Leave it to the locals to decide the best course of action Cheers - Phil -----Original Message----- From: Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> Sent: Friday, 29 October 2021 7:46 PM To: talk-au@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [talk-au] "Removing closed or illegal trails." (in Nerang National Park) Hi, On 29.10.21 09:08, fors...@ozonline.com.au wrote: > You could map a track under the "if it exists then map it" rule but > you don't have to. We do not map women's refuges and they exist. We > don't have to map every informal trail. This is true, and we shouldn't go out of our way to thwart the efforts of park managers. Having said that, 1. Sometimes the matter can be a civil rights issue - depending on the legal situation, people might have the *right* to use a path but a park manager would prefer them not to, and therefore deletes the track in order to keep people from exercising their rights. In that situation, while the park manager might want the best for the environment, the park manager would have to work to change the legal situation instead of trying to mislead people about what they are allowed to do. 2. In similar discussions we had people working with search and rescue teams say that they prefer to use OSM maps because those show the informal trails, and if you're searching for someone who got lost, knowing which informal trails they might have taken can be helpful - might even save lives. 3. If you have an emergency out in the wild, knowledge about informal or even prohibited/closed tracks can be helpful and again, might even save lives. 4. If you are navigating without a GPS, you might use trails for orientation ("take the second left after entering the forest" or whatever). In these cases if there's a trail that exists and is visible but is not shown on the map, you will mis-count. Therefore I would like to agree with Paul and Thorsten, and stress that we should (a) map access tags properly, and (b) lobby web sites and apps using OSM data to properly process these access tags, by not including access-restricted trails in routing or route suggestions, and by clearly marking these restrictions on maps. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au