I have been trying to map and use OSM for offroad cycling but I am starting to get frustrated. The particular problem I have is that north of Cambridge, almost any route across the Fens is a track with a subset of them being rights of way.
I know we have Freemap and OpenCycleMap but in all honesty, the performance and update frequency are not as good as the main Mapnik map so I tend to use that.
This has led to me marking some tracks with rights of way as highway=byway or bridleway just to get them shown on Mapnik as distinct from other tracks in the surrounding area. This seems like it is against the OSM way of doing things but in practice works well in my area because it can be hard to navigate over the Fens using legal rights of way with a Mapnik printout. There are tracks everywhere - finding one you can legally use is the problem.
I see a way out of this which is to update the rendering of byways, bridleways (and possibly footpaths). I can imagine rendering byways and bridleways in a similar way to tracks where the dashing adjusts if there is a tracktype attribute except they remain the same colour as they currently are.
How open are the OSM team (and UK mappers) to updates of this nature ? And, are highway=byway and bridleway UK specific so the rest of the world wouldn’t care too much if we all agree on a change ?
Phil.