Hiking route network tagging

[aighes (Henning)]

@quincylvania

I’ve actually stared experimenting with trail=yes/no on ways to indicate if they are part of the trail network without looking at relations. This may be a little too generic, perhaps a better pattern would be hiking=yes, cycling=yes, etc. Mirroring mtb=yes, these wouldn’t be access tags, just categorical.

That’s how everything started before we had relations and it was not quite useful if you want to add more information than just “that way is part of a local hiking route”, eg. which route. On top it’s hard to maintain and it’s easily forgotten on some small segments.

@quincylvania

In this context I do kind of like the idea of tagging more of these classification attributes on ways instead of relations. A given way might be part of several routes of different levels of importance, but a renderer would just care about the highest. I could see some sort of tagging on ways like hiking:class=primary or hiking:rank=2 or hiking:longdistance=yes.

Maybe there are some renderer which are interested in that, though usually the hiker wants to follow the hiking route he is on. So definitely you need the route relations. Deriving that information from the relations to the ways is an easy task for software and hard for us mappers to keep up to date.