On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 10:50 AM Richard Fairhurst <rich...@systemed.net> wrote: > OSM was founded in 2004 on the principle of "if they won't give us the > data, we'll make it ourselves" and that still holds true. I've started > on making sure all rail-trails of a reasonable length (say, 5 miles > upwards) are actually mapped in OSM, using route relations. [...] > So why not have a go? It's easy work and you get to see the routes > appear on http://cycling.waymarkedtrails.org pretty much instantly.
Yes, please! I try to do my part locally. I'm a hiker rather than a cyclist, so that affects what gets mapped, but I also watch what other people are mapping around here and try to repair the relations when they get messed up. People keep beating me to it, though; https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6133160 got done before I made it down there. Repairing the relations when someone inadvertently conflated https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1738631 with https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2692590 was quite a chore! (I found out about that one because 'Genesee Valley Greenway' showed up in my neighbourhood, near Albany and nowhere near the Genesee Valley.) I have never tried to import data on rail-trails, or indeed any other sort of trail. Not only are the external data sources frequently subject to aggressive copyright enforcement, but also they are frequently of abysmal data quality. I map this stuff with literal boots on the literal ground. (I *have* been known to use the external data sets as a "to do" list. I'm comfortable with that level of external dependency. Some of the hardliners here would say that once I've consulted such a data set, I'm permanently mentally contaminated and can't map the features that it shows, but that way lies madness!) There are too few of us. I keep seeing the same half-dozen names locally. More would be welcome. And route relations are important for sites like Waymarked Trails - it totally ignores walking and cycling routes that are not indicated with relations, which is why I wind up doing routes for even relatively trivial stuff like https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4836600.(although that certainly meets Richard's five-mile threshold). To reiterate: yes, please help! _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
