In another message you indicated that it would be best for you if a trail in the Pyrénées was split in stages rather than in “arbitrary or technically-defined” sections (my wording here).
These are legitimate claims (as soon as there is an official set of stages), but this makes a long list of legitimate reasons for splitting routes in subrelations:
operators
states
junctions of several routes who share a section
reducing relation size when there is no other reason for splitting
stages (and there might be several sets according to different authorities)
I think splitting hiking trails into conceptually meaningful stages is most useful for hikers and readers of hiking guides. I understand there are other valid reasons to split routes, but from my perspective, the priority should be on what adds the most value for end users. You can consider me a stakeholder advocating for splits that improve clarity and usability for hikers and guide readers.
At the moment, all of the most commonly hiked long distance trails are covered in both OSM and Wikivoyage, and all of those trails could have excellent hiking guides that are free and open source, that’s what I’m working towards.
I plan to split up the trail by state, into these sections:
Georgia
North Carolina & Tennessee (the trail crosses the state border multiple times here)
Virginia
West Virginia
Maryland
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
New York
Connecticut
Massachusetts
Vermont
New Hampshire
Maine
The other approach suggested would also work. I noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a strong desire to go either way. In this case, it would benefit me a lot, as I’m working on this guide: Appalachian Trail – Travel guide at Wikivoyage
I support splitting by US state. This approach follows the precedent of the East Coast Greenway.
What approach would you propose @jpolvto for naming each segment? I’d consider using a combination of the note and description. There is a tendency to use state abbreviations in the names which is handy for editing in OSM but is not so useful to the end user. I’d urge you to consider the ‘Name is the name only’ wiki policy. When third party applications show the trail named as “Appalachian Trail (VT),” I cringe.
That’s a good point. I’ve been wondering about this. I’ve exclusively seen the “state tags” or, “stage numbers” in the name of different relations. Are there tags specifically meant for states or stage numbers?
Also, be aware that most if not all renderers ignore the name of the main relation and only display the names of the most terminal subrelations. This makes for weird names on maps sometimes.
The sections don’t all begin and end at a state lines, but that means the sections are more similar in length, ranging from around a hundred to several hundred miles.
USBRS [1] goes state-by-state for (national) bicycle routing, as well, because “that’s how the state DOTs and AASHTO do it,” AND for the reason that big, huge relations in OSM are often unwieldy to edit (even with JOSM, even with many gigabytes and dozens of CPU/GPU cores).
This is a more fundamental-to-OSM’s-API issue (relations of hundreds or worse, thousands of members are sluggish to edit), but it is part of what has evolved and emerged, especially in these here United States of America.
USBR 95 in California (1069 miles — a monster!) is broken up into four relations: northern, central, southern and south. And even those (with many hundreds of members each) are a beefy chunk of data for any editor of OSM route relations.
Statewide is a good choice, as it is a good size for OSM’s scope. Sometimes, we get two small New England states or a cultural or co-managed region together, OK. ATC trail guides do, too.
@jpolvto Thanks for your work splitting up the AT in a more manageable way! I admit my splitting it by trail club proved a bit unwieldy and unsatisfactory in the end. Happy to have the trail clubs saved in operator for now, and maybe moved to community_adopter at some point.