Circling back to this… I agree that it’s annoying to have noncontiguous relations when segmenting the AT by club. 30 is really too many subrelations to maintain, and I’d be more than happy to segment by the four regions, or even just have a single relation. However, I’d still like some way to model the club data.
I went ahead and added operator, operator:short, and operator:wikidata for the trail clubs to all the highway member ways of the AT relations. This is useful in itself, but doesn’t seem like a full replacement for the club relations. There are some complications, like how some of the ways are public roads or sidewalks that are really operated by a town or DOT. There is also the hiker ferry which is operated by a subcontractor, apparently through the ATC itself and not the local MATC.
Overall, operator is a little unsatisfying as a full replacement for the club relations. maintainer is in use but I’m not sure it would solve all the issues. Maybe it would make sense to make a new tag that indicates the “friends of” group that takes care of a trail?