Branches with equal importance in (hiking, bicycle) routes

[StC]

(Since I cannot split a topic myself, I create a new topic about branches in routes, which became a topic of its own here:
Using the new quality assurance function in Waymarkedtrails - #6 by StC; I’m doing my best below to reproduce the beginnings of the debate.)

@lonvia

@StC

@lonvia

@StC

@lonvia

@StC

I found no solution [in Waymarkedtrails QA] to deal with routes that have two main branches, e.g. Relation: ‪Via Turonensis‬ (‪6026933‬) | OpenStreetMap;

That likely will never be supported. Any particular reason why one of them cannot be an alternative?

I believe we discussed this already, and you yourself considered that E2 should be treated as one route and not two routes (E2 east and E2 west). It happens sometimes that route designers do not choose to treat two branches as a main route and an alternative, just as two branches.

EDIT: and sometimes there are even wilder beasts, with multiple branches or multiple loops that the designer explicitly documents as being of the same importance. One could argue that node networks are the ultimate case of that. I believe that the goal is to spread the number of hikers on the trails.

I don’t see the alternative role as making any qualitative judgement. It just says that there is another route that can be chosen. If your route has two main branches just chose one to tag as alternative at random and be done with it.

I would consider that as a case of “tagging for the QA system”, sorry. In Waymarkedtrails, for instance, one is displayed with a continuous line and the other with a dashed line. Talk about qualitative judgement But these are edge cases, and maybe we can discuss them elsewhere. My goal here was more to propose that we launch a quality assurance campaign on international routes.

So, basically you don’t want to use alternative because you don’t like that it gets rendered in dashed lines…

You clearly have the situation here that the user has two alternatives and they have to decide to use one of the two. If they are of equal importance or not is not relevant. The user still has to decide. I can’t think of a better word than alternative for this situation but feel free to use a different role name. Marking that a part of the route is not linear but split up in some way or another would still be helpful.

[StC]

@lonvia

So, basically you don’t want to use alternative because you don’t like that it gets rendered in dashed lines…

We could put it that way, but I would not consider it as a good summary of the exchange above. I would rather put it as two questions and my own replies to them:

• would adding the alternative role randomly on one of the relations represent the ground truth or a way of tagging for the QA analyser? I think the latter.
• if there is a deliberate intention from route designers to avoid over-population on routes through the creation of branches with equal importance, would we be abusing that intention by displaying one of the two routes as dashes or any other distinguishing feature ? I think so.

Would tagging the two branches as alternative be an acceptable compromise?

[lonvia]

If it is a different concept then I’d rather suggest using a different role.

[alan_gr (Alan)]

Maybe a “branch” role would be useful for this situation, to be applied equally to members of both branches?

[StC]

I was going to propose “branch” too.

[StC]

I have added two subrelations with role branch in relation 6026933, as an experiment

[rhhs (Richard)]

There are also “branches” that are used seasonally. This way follows the top of a narrow ridge and is the preferred winter route (no avalanche danger), while this way has avalanche danger in winter but is safer in summer (esp. in a thunderstorm). Both are part of the Bulgarian E3 without a role assigned to them, which gives QA issues. It would be nice to tag them as summer and winter routes. Data consumers could then assume that most map users hike in the summer, and treat the summer route as the main route and the winter one as alternative. Or they could ask the user, look at the date on which the map is used, etc.

[StC]

we also have “high tide alternatives” along the French coasts