Réseau de randonnées pédestre : destination et temps ?

[lonvia]

@Shernott

I agree with you, there are so many nodes in the Swiss hiking network that creating a route for every possible connection between them would become extremely tedious. But using the route relation to describe unordered local collections of ways feels to me like abusing the concept of a route. From a route I expect that it takes me on a trip from A to B or on a round trip. And maybe a relation is not even needed here.

Basically, what you want is to designate ways as members of the Swiss hiking network. This could be simply expressed by using the tag network=iwn/nwn/rwn/lwn on ways instead of routes only. Or maybe even creating a subkey highway:network=* would make sense, I don’t know if similar problems have emerged for other highway types than hiking paths. But as far as I see, determining the network membership of a way is all that is needed, for the distinction between “hiking”, “mountain hiking” and “alpine hiking” there is already the sac_scale tag.

I do agree on the abuse part and it would make live a lot easier for data processing if we would strictly stick to the node-route model. But then again, I prefer to make life easier for mappers, so that much data is entered, and there seem to develop a majority who prefer entering whole networks, so I can live with that (as a data processor, too).

As for tagging the ways directly: first of all, it would only apply to the local Swiss hiking network (the ways marked yellow, white-red-white and white-blue-white). The routes of “Swiss Mobile” are perfectly valid routes in their own right and merit a relation. As for the local network, a tag like hiking_network=yellow/red/blue might seem practical. That we use relations none the less, is mostly a matter of international compatibility. There is not a lot of consensus on how to tag marked hiking routes but the minimum is: use a relation of type route=foot/walking/hiking. And there is a good reason for that: sooner or later somebody wants to stick additional tags to the route. For example, I started to note the name of ways that sometimes appear on the hiking posts within the frame of the local hiking network because they do not have their own waymarking (e.g. Strada Alta: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1152292 ). Another thing that comes to mind are walking times (although hiking posts are most probably better suited for that).

A final note on the sac_scale tag: this describes the difficulty of the way and not how it is waymarked. I have classified plenty of paths as sac_scale=hiking that were marked white-red-white and I never put a sac_scale tag on anything other than highway=path because roads and tracks are always of difficulty sac_scale=hiking.

Sarah