Long distance hiking trails project

General talk
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Thanks, I just added this to my mental list of things to discuss in our sub-community: how do we track progress? In France we have figures published by the national hiking federation but it’s not clear how they obtain them and I’ve found that figures produced by each local authority or tourist office are inflated. Anyway, nobody here seems to have spent much time tracking progress so far.

This makes at least a half dozen if topics I’like to raise with you guys. Hopefully you have yours too. But with my current perception of this community Discourse I feel that creating threads would be like throwing pebbles on a beach hoping the right people find them.It is only months after it was created that I discovered this very thread, lost amongst threads in Korean and Dutch, and pointed @pyrog to it. So I believe Davey’s intention was “create the conditions in which we easily detect new topics and can work more efficiently towards consensus or action”

The trick above (setting our application parameters) may be what we need for that. If that is the case we probably need to advertise it (where?). Otherwise we need everything else we can find. Maybe even a report to the site managers to explain our difficulties? Something like “we’re the long trail mapping experts but we keep losing our way”.

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Thanks, I’ve added the hiking tag to some recent discussions on related topics. If we all do the same we’ll have a nice overview of relevant discussions on the tag page

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I have :slight_smile:
I recently begun opening an issue for every single hiking trail in Sweden that I find in some primary source (municipality or similar website og open data)

The data I find I store in Wikidata, see Wikidata:WikiProject Hiking trails - Wikidata because it is a better platform to keep track of things and it can easily be linked to OSM with the linking tool i recently built

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Well, in all honesty I have too. But I have kind of put it off, both because I felt very much alone trying to update information in the wiki, and because I had the feeling that more automated solutions could come from integrated QA & monitoring tools.

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After exploring a bit (thanks for the tip!) and noticing that tags are free form, chosen by users (e.g. @pangoSE uses hiking-routes instead of hiking), I’d rather be in favor of the creation of a Community named “Hiking (English spoken)” or “Outdoors (English please)”, which would be both easier to monitor and more easily found by new users.

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The machine translation feature integrated into Discourse (the little globe that appears next to the thumbs up button when you’re looking at a foreign language post) works surprisingly well.

If you read some of the recent Korean posts, some of them actually make the point that having separate subforums per language is problematic because it excludes speakers of other languages, and the fact that the general forums are predominantly English speaking means that whatever is discussed there is just accepted as the global consensus without input from people who don’t speak English well enough to feel comfortable posting there.
(At least that’s the point I think they’re making, based on machine translation of the posts, haha)

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a discussion about hiking trails where each of us feels free to post in whatever language they want, and still we all understand each other?

This would work even better if thread titles were auto-translated and if we had multilingual tags or multilingual community names.

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Yes, I was among the ones who suggested it originally. But as you guessed I’m talking here about topic titles. Browsing a list of titles in various languages to find the ones you may be interested in just defeats the whole idea of subscribing to domains you’re interested in.

And believe me it’s frustrating to feel the responsibility of transmitting ideas from my own linguistic community to this forum and back. Unfortunately, I must accept that even with auto-translation my compatriots do not feel like coming. We’re not there yet. Not far, but not yet.

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“Outdoors” would be good - there’s a lot of commonality between working with walking routes and cycling routes, for example.

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Outdoors would be a good forum to dispute that statement! :slight_smile:

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I am currently working on the E2 hiking route.

Why now?
I got a request by the operator/developer of longdistancepaths.eu to check and improve the route relations. He uses gpx-exports to transport the osm-routes to his site. The challenge is to make sure that the exports are single strand continuous gps-tracks. To do this, you need to make sure there is one continuous route designated as the main route.

Issues
Gaps in the single gpx-track are caused by missing ways, wrong order in relations, roundabouts, variants added as ways with roles, missing connectivity between sub-relations, and the use of complete regional path relations where the E2 only uses part of the regional hiking path.
Ah, and the use of backward and forward roles, which is normal for bicycle relations but useless for hiking relations.

Since the E2 is a complex collection of national, regional and even local hiking trails, and most of those include variants and/or are used only in part, this is not a trivial task. Trying to catch this collection in a single hierarchy of relations is not everybody’s cup of tea.

Tools:
Tools are beginning to pop up, but none (yet) are up to this very complex task. I simply use waymarkedtrails for an overview and to check the hierarchies, sometimes also to check for gaps using the elevation profile. Then I load problematic relations into JOSM (Control Shift O). So far, I had to load each and every relation into JOSM!

Progress
Currently, I fixed the east variant part UK (Scotland and England).
I will continue with the UK west variant to finish the UK part.

Then Nederland, Belgium and France. I have done Nederland and Belgium in the not-so-distant past, and I know these areas and their OSM communities better than the UK or France.
In France, E2=GR5 and I believe much work has been done already by the national OSM community. Some of these mappers are also active on this forum.

I expect to finish this project end of next week.

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Er, not quite.. I’d suggest checking with people familiar with the on-the-ground situation elsewhere too - the Teesdale Way had some issues before and seems to have some different issues too.

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Thanks, I will look into it and correct my mistakes. Looks like the route mapping in the UK has increased since the last time I checked there!

I may have to accept a few gaps where the separate ways do not actually connect. I did use viewers to find the acorns, but failed.

Ground truth is a thing - on the continent we sometimes have a few markers at important points, and in between you have to follow the regional or national markers (or even a local trail). Since these few markers associate the actual path symbol with the E2 symbol, I think that is considered ground truth.

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The best page I’m of aware of about the UK part of the E2 was removed from the Ramblers Association website when they upgraded their website about a decade ago, but is available still via this archive org link
At least the Essex Way section and the link path to Harwich International don’t sign the E2 route - my assumption has always been that it is this footpath then Ray Lane, Refinery Road that is the intended route.
Edit: I’ve just found some newer websites about the E2 that show following the Essex Way all the way to Harwich which leaves you nowhere near the International Port (which is near Parkeston). I suspect this mistake crept in after the Ramblers Association removed the details from their site.

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Maybe a daft question but why are these routes not waymarked?

In my experience most HAs are pretty laid back about waymarking routes provided you don’t ask them the either pay for the waymarks or go out and install them.

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too bad knooppuntnet.nl finds those routes too large

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In the past, the Yorkshire Wolds Way route relation was copied and the copy was adapted to fit the E2, cutting a piece at the north end where the previous regional/national path lands on it, and adding a different south ending to cross the bridge to the next regional/national path. I guess this happens in other locations and in other countries as well.

How to deal with this?

I think there is too little difference to warrant a copy of the whole Yorkshire Wolds path relation. I took the existing relation in the E2 superroute, I had no idea that there was another Yorkshire Wolds Way relation.

Usually, if a part of a route is used in a superroute, I cut the route into separate parts and use only the appropriate part.
If there is a gap between two routes, it depends. If there is any indication that the routes refer to each other, I create a short link relation. If there is really nothing, I guess we shouldn’t map a link.

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You can use Knooppuntnet for the parts, but not the whole route. The problems with such an international route are mainly in the hierarchy, and Knooppuntnet does not solve that.
Also, for E2 we have no reference route. So you can’t get a list of differences between an authoritative E2 (gpx) and what OSM has mapped.

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I was surprised that someone (you, Peter ?) split E2 into two relations, E2 East and E2 West. Is that what we want to do?

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Rather than duplicating it, it would make sense to me to split the Wolds Way into three - the part from Hessle to where it joins the E2 (no idea wthether it is signposted into Hessle, which is another question), then the bit shared between Wolds Way / E2, then perhaps a bit on the end to the end of Filey Brigg, depending on where the “big acorn” marker is at the end. Then delete the duplicate relation.

There are acorns along the route, like this:

Filey-29-Acorn-IMG_20210802_203035
Filey-29-Acorn-IMG_20210802_2030351920×2560 586 KB

That one’s 29 miles from Filey. There are much bigger artwork ones on the way, and I presume the one at the end is bigger too.

Edit: In case it wasn’t clear above, I know it wasn’t Peter that originally split it in this way - it was done like this years ago. He’s just trying to sort things out (for which much gratitude).

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THe ERA says

You may find the E-paths below or find the routes and download GPX files at Waymarked Trails and find information about the E-paths at Wikipedia.

You can also find more detailed information about the E-Paths on the website of our partner Traildino.

Traildino does not make the routes, just displays them and offers gpx’s. I don’t no how/by whom these are made. I guess they all refer to the national operators to decide on the routes, and the signage. I know in Nederland they are not trying very hard to get it right. Belgium: bothe the east and the west routes cross Belgium. There were some problems, and together with the Flemish mapper community I negotiated the routes (and some necessary changes due to permanent ferry problems) with the Belgian national hiking routes operator, to align OSM and their national website. I think Traildino now uses the newer routes as well.

Another true story: The GR5 in Belgium and Nederland are part of E2 east route. But the sections did not connect; the border-crossing part didn’t exist. I think the Flemish OSM community initiated talks about this, resulting in the Flemish operator taking responsability for the connection (signage and maintenance). In OSM the section had already been mapped as part of GR5 Nederland. We just added operator={the Flemish operator} to the section.

So it pretty much boils down to local action to get the national operators to move a finger, and national operators just pick a few existing named ways which sort of cover the thing, and then forget about it until some OSM mapper knocks the door down.

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