Copying name tag from relation to its child members does not seem to me like a super hard problem. What about data consumers that don’t want to show trail names or are using names from relations but the names on ways make a duplicate label?
Copying name tag from relation to its child members does not seem to me like a super hard problem.
I’d just you try out using PlanetTiler, Tile Maker, or osm2pgsql to create a non-trivial tileset from OSM data. It’s fairly eye opening to deal with some of the surprising challenges of converting OSM tags to renderable data.
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To add a couple of examples, I believe that the flex output of osm2pgsql would support that in lua (though the old “standard” output doesn’t). There’s a version of OSM Carto around which uses flex which worked when I tested it. It’d be an interesting exercise for someone interested** to copy relation names down to ways.
It’s also been supported by mkgmap / Garmin since basically forever (the example code has a proof-of-concept for buses); it’s trivial to do something similar with hiking etc. routes.
** which wouldn’t be me; I have an OSM Carto-based style that handles route relations in a different way. If someone wanted to port that to flex, fill your boots; but it’s not been a priority for me.
If a way is a member of just one relation then it shouldn’t be terribly hard, though a bit more work than simply getting the name tag off the way. However, for ways that are members of multiple route relations (the whole point of route relations) it can become complex, raising questions with unclear answers. If you are trying to just display the most local path name (not all route names) it is not clear how to identify which relation represents this. If one relation has a network of lwn and the other is nwn it may be reasonable to assume the former is the name of the path. [1] But maybe they are both lwn, or maybe there are 5 different lwn routes, or maybe a mix of lwn and lcn. Which name should be chosen as the path name then? A situation like this can also mean that the named routes are all following a pre-existing unnamed path, in which case it isn’t appropriate to use any of the names from the relations as the path name because the path truly doesn’t have one.
Thought his could be wrong if the longer route is older ↩︎
I don’t think neither of you is right or wrong. It’s simply not the question. Either the way has a name, then the way should get a name-tag. If the way has no name, but there is a route using the way and having a way, then the route should have the name-tag.
If a data-consumer decides not using route-relations, that’s ok. Though it should never be the reason to change our data just to make data visible in a specific service.
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Perhaps that makes sense in Germany, but in other parts of the world, the situation is very ambiguous. Sometimes there are obvious cases where the “XYZ Trail” or “Something Road” is a section of the “ABC Long Distance Trail.” Sometimes, there are sections of “ABC Long Distance Trail” that have no other name. Our common cultural understanding of those situations in the United States is that those sections of trails are simply named “ABC Long Distance Trail” and thus we would generally consider it correct that the path ways and the route relation would have a matching name.
A similar debate in the United States extends to roads and road route relations.
There are no clear-cut answers because there is no clear-cut reality. Be very very cautious about trying to apply local or national cultural understandings elsewhere, because they often will clash in different contexts.
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Ironically, the better analogy is in other countries besides the U.S. At least in most U.S. states we have something of a distinction between roads and the routes that follow them. If you go to London, point to Lewisham Way, and ask someone on the street if A20 is the road number or the route number, you’d probably get a quizzical look in response. (Officially, it’s a road number, but road numbers sure behave like route numbers.)
Unless I’ve misunderstood, it seems to me that @aighes and @Zelonewolf may actually be in agreement but talking slightly past each other. There are essentially three different situations:
| On the ground situation | OSM tagging |
|---|---|
| Named route following a nameless path | relation: name=Name A way: omit name |
| Named route following a path with a different name | relation: name=Name A way: name=Name B |
| Named route following a path with the same name | relation: name=Name A way: name=Name A |
If the path is named, the way gets a name. If the route is named, the relation gets a name. If they are both named the same thing, they both get the same name tag.
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My contention is that this situation:
and this one:
…are in fact the exact same situation and we are creating a distinction that either doesn’t exist or only exists in different cultural understandings.
I have no idea how you would survey a trail and decide which of these cases is extant.
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This table is a bit of a tautology, just saying the same thing in human-readable and machine-readable terms. Isn’t the question before us whether the path is indeed nameless?
For a fifty-some-post-long topic, I’ve seen very few examples to clarify what we’re even talking about. Maybe someone can help me understand based on these examples in my neck of the woods:
- The Firefly Trail is one of several loop trails in a nature preserve. Because it turns at intersections with other trails, it’s modeled as multiple ways. It’s marked by signs with a little firefly on it. Should there be a relation? Should it be a route relation? Should “Firefly Trail” appear on both the route relation and the pathway?
- The Perimeter Trail is a loop trail in a nearby state park. There’s no relation for the Perimeter Trail either. It has blazes, but it also carries the North Country Trail, American Discovery Trail, and Buckeye Trail, all of which are marked by some combination of route markers and blazes as well. Should any of the three long-distance trails’ names appear on the pathway?
- An unnamed path in the same park carries two of these routes for a couple hundred feet, shortcutting a slightly longer hike to the parking lot. In lieu of a name for this specific shortcut, should it be named the NCT and/or BT? (Not that the trail names in this park are particularly original.)
- Beyond the park, the Perimeter Trail continues for about 7 miles (11 km) on an unnamed path. Should it be named the NCT, ADT, and/or BT?
- These long-distance trails converge on a medium-distance bike trail that has a route relation pretty much for the sake of Waymarked Trails. (If I delete it, it would probably come back in a jiffy.) In order to get to the bike trail, you have to traverse a short, unnamed shared use path, crosswalk, and parking lot access road. Should any of these ways be named after the long-distance trails?
Unfortunately, I don’t have much in the way of on-the-ground imagery to share for any of these examples. But what should I be on the lookout for, to decide what to create a relation for and what to name?
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Imagine that “ABC Long Distance Trail” follows some pre-existing urban paths and sidewalks through a town. I would not consider ABC Long Distance Trail to be the name of these paths because they are first and foremost part of the town’s pedestrian network and in that context they do not have names. On the other hand I would consider ABC Long Distance Trail to be the name for a path built specifically for this long distance route. This is a suble distinction that requires good local knowledge to make, but I don’t see these two situations as exactly the same.
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I believe that there is a fourth case: several routes that follow an unnamed path.
It seems difficult to me to equate this case with a route following a path with the same name. Therefore Brian’s equation needs to be refined at least
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That’s fair. I was hoping a different format might be helpful, but perhaps it was just redundant. That is indeed the question, and I think the answer is “it depends”. I don’t think a strict guideline works for this.
I’m ambivalent about whether there should be a relation or not, but it seems clear to me that the path way should have the name in either case.
I would say no. It sounds like the path has a distinct name and isn’t primarily known by the name of one of the routes using it.
I’d guess probably not for such a small section, but if someone with local knowledge asserted that it should be I’d take their word for it.
For this one I’d say the path name is the one that is most prominently signed on the ground, most well known locally, or oldest. However, if there is no signage and none of these names are used locally then leaving the path nameless may make sense.
I’d say definitely not for the service road. For the shared use path and crosswalk I’d say probably not, but they could be if that little section were signed with any of the names, or labelled as such on a trailhead map. It doesn’t look like that’s the case here since the route follows mostly streets, not paths in the vicinity.
I can potentially buy this argument – “this isn’t ABC Long Distance Trail, this is just a sidewalk but we needed to route over it to connect the dots.” Okay fine - that sidewalk is much more an “unnamed sidewalk” than the trail. I tend to think of these as corner cases of the trail routing over “clearly a different thing from a hiking trail” in the same manner as when these trails briefly go along automobile roads and not really what I’m talking about.
This, I have a problem with, or at least, in the manner it’s formulated and articulated here.
I disagree specifically with “built specifically for this long distance route.” I do not think that OSM mappers should have to divine the intent or read the mind of a long-ago trailblazer, nor do I think it matters whether or not a trail existed in that specific spot before it came to be part of a route named “ABC Long Distance Trail.” That’s the sort of historical research that’s appropriate in OpenHistoricalMap but I think irrelevant for OSM.
I think that if ABC Long Distance Trail is a route=hiking, that any dedicated hiking trail section that carries no other name and no other route should be tagged name=ABC Long Distance Trail on its member ways.
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This wording is clear enough that it could be used in a wiki page that details the policy in each region of the world. I believe another rule will be proposed for France, and probably for neighbouring countries.
Agree on that (including above mentioned exclusion of sidewalks and roads). Only open point, what about sections with multiple routes? Should they get name=name_A;name_B or no name and only route-relations?
Excatly this was what I was talking about. Though first case might only be occuring rather seldom in the US.
I also think of these as corner cases for hiking trails, but they do happen so we should consider them if attempting to develop guidelines. I’m also not confident that this sort of thing is definitely always a corner case for all US hiking and walking trails. It is definitely more common for multi-use and bike trails (see several of the examples @1ec5 posted).
This is a good point, and I agree. It’s really about the current primary identity of the path, not the reason it was built in the past. Although being purpose built for the route would generally lead to the path having the route name as a primary identity, upon reflection I realize I was just using that as a proxy.
I don’t know if it’s actually that rare. If there is anything potentially regional here, I think it’s that folks on the East Coast enjoy a concentration of long-distance trails that are so well-known that people use their names for wayfinding, even on the spot. Even though the Buckeye Trail is well-known among backpackers in Ohio, and the American Discovery Trail isn’t quite obscure, these names matter more to people who are deliberately following these routes than to day trippers who are hiking locally or enjoying a park that’s connected to the trail.
I’ll obnoxiously apply another road analogy: many of these long-distance trails remind me of state scenic routes and National Scenic Byways. Regardless of whether the individual component roadways have names, the scenic route exists more for route planning (tourism! economic development!) than for wayfinding.
This reminds me that someone tagged the names of Minnesota’s scenic routes all over that state’s highway ways. I don’t think a user should be told to hang a left at “Amish Buggy Byway/Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway”, which is really just an unnamed portion of U.S. 52.
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Further to the east, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, in a small village in the Alps, where two long-distance-hiking routes cross, which are dutifully signed and one even dutifully trailblazed (at leas in the woods), nobody ever would go walk their dog on the stretch of “Jakobsweg” or “Via Romea” (the long distance trails) hat locally we call “Lansersteig” or “Schlosssteig”. Neither - where there are just nameless paths.
@ConradWard - Here (Austria) there are a lot of short trails, created, maintained and signed by different bodies, route=foot rather than route=hiking, if that makes a difference for anybody. The local community does not mind having them on the ways, after all, that is how they are known.