Well, “waymarkedtrails.com” redirects to some for-pay thing called “hiiker.app”, which is not useful.
Look: we are a small group trying to define a knowable sequence of green spaces and less-busy roads to explore between Boston MA US and various park destinations north of there, similar to how the well-established Bay Circuit trail is a big relation that links up *many* open-space components encircling the Boston area like part of a wheel. We’re essentially working on one of the north-south “spokes” of same, and if our work-product is going to show up in other facilities like AllTrails we have to have *something* defined in Open Streetmap as that’s also the backend they use. It is only a single relation at this point, it’s not destroying anything on the underlying map, and nobody will even be able to find it until it’s officially linked on our website in some form or other. The point is to get the appropriate data laid out *without* having to tediously add a bunch of duplicate ways, which would be stupid. There are plenty of relations (and super-relations, I’ll point out) like these that “piggyback” off what’s already there, even if what’s already there is kind of sketchy in the first place.
We’ve also had to re-think and modify the route a bit over time, based on real-life evaluation of which components make the most sense for our purpose and keep people safe while exploring them. That’s why there might be a few off-route chunks still kicking around – I’ll get to those, I only have so many hours in the day.
Maybe we’re not quite as “verifiable” as the Bay Circuit yet, but we ARE working on that and for anyone to denigrate those efforts and advocate simply trashing the whole thing is just rude. Check our website, really. We even have one of the original founders of the Bay Circuit on our little committee, who busted his butt many years ago getting permission to install physical markers across various towns and parks and pushing for general open-space preservation at administrative levels.
The other “cloning” thread reflects intent to have two relations or some better solution, one for hiking and one for biking at a minimum, because there are some areas where bikes are prohibited and we want to accomodate both modes. So that’s why I started that thread, and I’ll comment on developments there in a bit.
Our relation, and its bicycle-mode clone if we ever manage to set that up, will get cleaned up over time as I work on it. I’m trying to do as little way-splitting as needed, although it is needed here and there for tiny sections of long roads and the like. I’m finding quite a few ways that simply don’t make sense in the process – and other mappers created those, it’s not MY fault. In the interim, I include them or skip them with the intent of going back and cleaning up the necessary components later.
So, WORK IN PROGRESS, please don’t bother commenting if you’re only going to be is antagonistic. We are a legitimate effort, but still finding our way, so to speak.
