Woazboat
September 16, 2024, 9:05pm
56
It is worth noting that this is not the first time a similar topic has been discussed. I haven’t really read these other threads yet and there may be more, but I’ll just leave these links here:
Overview & Issue:
There’s a number of paths that are… shockingly straight lines that completely ignore contours. I haven’t been on all of them, but I’ve been on some and they feel much more like a route in the western US sense of the term - a cross country path (think Roper or Skurka) where users are expected to use their own discretion routefinding but make their way from described locations or waypoints to the next ones. Drawing lines in between widely spaced nodes to make a path is a poor ex…
tl;dr, there can be real world impacts from showing paths where there are none, ranging from environmental impact to personal safety. If it makes sense to have a fictional one for routing, have some sort of tag for it along the lines of pathless_for_routing or fictional_for_routing.
I’m sure a better name exists.
Original post from the first version of this thread:
sac_scale is the global standard on OSM for describing the difficulty of moving over terrain for trails/paths/wilderness ways/etc. This isn’t ideal as mappers in areas that don’t use SAC aren’t familiar with it, and users that come across it don’t really know what it means. I can mentally map T1-4 pretty easily, but don’t feel like I have a good grasp on where the lines between 4-6 would be (and to be fair, there will never be a 100% consensu…
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