Trails: Use ‘Name’ and/or ‘Hiking Route?’

There has been a lot of talk about long distance hiking routes like the Appalachian Trail in this thread, but mostly the dispute in Connecticut is over much shorter walking trails in small parks. Take for example the Chimney Trail in Chatfield Hollow State Park. @ConradWard added the name and the next day @Mashin removed the name from the way in favor of the relation. This small loop is less than half a kilometer long and doesn’t overlap with any other named routes. It’s pretty clearly a named path. I’ve certainly added route relations for short paths like this so they would show up on Waymarked Trails. However, I don’t delete the name from the trail ways when I do so because I know there are many OSM based trail maps that don’t pull names from route relations. Truthfully I have a hard time rationalizing how such short paths could really be considered hiking “routes”. So maybe short trails like this shouldn’t have route relations at all, but what exactly the criteria should be for a hiking route relation is unclear.

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