Routes developed at national/regional level (typically, they are part of a local cycle network) but not signed with EuroVelo signs yet - I think these should be mapped as EuroVelo but with some kind of tag to say that they are not signed as such
Routes “under development” or “at the planning stage”, meaning that these routes have been selected to become EuroVelo and the region/locality may have plans to improve their infrastructure, but they can contain dangerous sections - we can decide that these routes should not be mapped in OSM but in some countries, they are the “best available solution” for cyclists and it’s still interesting information
As long as they’re tagged as such, that’s fine - I’m not going to get all “deletionist” about what belongs in OSM and what doesn’t.
I’m mostly worried about situations where the (undeveloped) route is currently mapped along a busy road, or an unimproved rocky trail. Routers often take official cycle route status as an assurance of some minimum quality, and obviously an undeveloped route doesn’t come with this assurance. If a router sends someone along a very busy road, and claims it’s a EuroVelo route, that’s not good for the cyclist, the router author or indeed EuroVelo/ECF!
(Proposed cycle routes have been mapped in the UK since cycle route mapping first began in OSM, mostly using state=proposed on the relation - you can see this if you zoom into OpenCycleMap, for example here.)
We are going to make a proposal to the NECC for a common open source license. Do you know which licenses make it easy for OSM? If we go for a license of the type ODC-by, with required attribution of www.EuroVelo.com, would that make things complicated on OSM? I would guess yes, since the required attribution changes when we put tracks on OSM?
ODC-By is good. Generally you just need to accept that a credit to www.eurovelo.com at Contributors - OpenStreetMap Wiki (which is linked from the OpenStreetMap link customarily placed on-map) will suffice - the EuroVelo credit won’t appear directly on the map when downstream users show an OSM map.
More generally, still in the UK, Sustrans has removed its listing for some national routes along busy roads. What is the status of the Eurovelo routes that shared the same roads?
AIUI there are two places where this has significantly changed.
In Scotland, NCN status has been removed from much of the previous network (generally because of fast traffic rather than heavy traffic, I think). The routes are still signposted cycle routes, just with a name/symbol rather than an NCN number. They will remain part of EuroVelo routes where they were before.
In parts of Lincolnshire and East Anglia, parts of NCN 1 (EV 12) have also been downgraded. I don’t know what the situation is here - I imagine it’s similar.
Everything else (EV 1, 2 and 12 in the rest of England and Wales) is largely unaffected.
(I’m a Sustrans volunteer but not on any EuroVelo routes!)
Just to add a bit of context, Sustrans’ page for NCN1 (part of EV12) is here and their map link (which is at OS, and likely isn’t license-compatible with OSM as is) is here.
There are issues reconciling where Sustrans thinks a route goes now, where it is signed on the ground as going, and what is in OSM as the route. Any one of those three may be “correct” in different cases. Having a definition of EV routes in a source compatible with OSM would be really helpful, because it might help understand which of those three might be “correct”.
Florence, would you like me to create monitors for EV routes in Knooppuntnet? It takes a few minutes, I just need you to tell me which ones. Ideally with the relation number.
Edit: I have make a first experiment with EV1. See eu-icn-EV.
Knooppuntnet has issues with forward/backward roles, and more generally with non-linear topologies, but a look at the maps reveal other causes of discontinuities in EV1. I also tried EV4, but the German section looks too large a relation for Knooppuntnet as well as for ID and the JOSM History viewer (> 4000 members!)
Hi, thanks for your offer, it would be great if you can create monitors for all EuroVelo routes in Knooppuntnet! It would help to list all the problematic parts and go about fixing them. I can put everything you need together and send it to you next week.
Just to be sure I understand everything, and all the potential of this tool, could you direct me to a page/document explaining the functionality? The DEMO videos seem to be more for using the route planner tool than about the comparison tool, unless I’m wrong?
And regarding the little experiment that you already did, did you use the tracks from www.EuroVelo1.com to make the comparison with OSM tracks or not? (I can send you the full route tracks in better quality, though there are always imprecise bits here and there). If not, how do you spot the routing issues - do you mean the relations that are just a few nodes, or where we see loops?
So please confirm what you would need for this: relation of each EuroVelo route + official tracks to compare OSM tracks to?
And for relations that are too big such as EuroVelo 4, I guess the best is to do cut them? But it could become quite a long work then.
Anyway, let’s go one step at a time Thanks for your help!
It’s best to work with examples, currently. If you look at the EV1 example you see first that I have chosen an “OSM reference” and not a GPX reference".
OSM reference compares the geometry of the route captured at a given date with its current geometry. As explained by Peter in another thread, it is useful for route operators who want to see if improvements made to OSM should be ported back to their own reference data.
GPX reference compares the route with a GPX file that has been uploaded. It helps for instance when creating the route in OSM or when the data provided by the operator changes.
I have chosen “OSM reference”, because it was faster for me. It means that we start with 0 deviation reported, and that deviations are not a relevant information. What is relevant is the number of segments and the maps of segments because that is where you see discontinuities (and also bugs in KPN, which are already known)
I have worked on the documentation of Knooppuntnet Planner and Knooppuntnet Analysis, here.
I guess this wiki page should get another tab for Knooppuntnet Monitor. Problem is that I have not been involved in the creation of Knooppuntnet Monitor, so I basically have to find out how it works, just as any of you, and I am currently working on other projects.
Not that much work if done properly with JOSM. The point is that:
the OSM culture tends to favor changes made by local contributors. It protects us from overenthusiastic contributors who want to “standardize” or “normalize” things, or who work based on dubious data sources, without any kind of control by a “well-informed community”. If we decide that “we Europeans” are the locals for E-paths and EV routes, and that any of us should feel free to make changes in other countries, then the working group needs somehow to become the well-informed community in question.
a number of questions are open as how to organize long routes, their stages and their alternative sections. A proposal has been put forward by Nadjita, that definitely constitutes a useful basis but requires additional points of view to be considered mature.
I wrote this about hiking route relations; cycle route relations are broadly similar in OSM (with the obvious caveat, already mentioned, that you’re more likely to have parallel oneway sections on a cycle route than a hiking route).
I have started the work of segmenting EV4-Germany into segments of roughly 500 members joining large cities. My work is not committed yet to OSM. When I commit, it will need review.
With large relations of any sort, I’d actually suggest “committing as you go”, as constituent ways can easily get split all the time, which would require you to reconcile your changes with whatever else has happened…
as soon as Florence sends me the traces and I’ve tried to add the routes. A few of them may end up being too large like EV4 and someone may need to split them before we can add them.
I found that the GPX files are available on the EuroVelo site, but that KPN seems to have difficulties to handle them. In order to avoid overloading the server, I will stick to OSM references until the KPN developer tells me it’s OK to switch to GPX references.
Consequently, I am adding all the EV routes now. It should be done or nearly done when you read this message.
Thanks for your help!
