On Mon, 19 Aug 2019 at 15:13, Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (Summary: What do the data *consumers* want to see in the tagging for > route alternatives, circular routes, and routes that begin and end on > dual carriageways?) > Since you've broadened the discussion to deal with more than just walking/ hiking/cycling routes, I'll take the opportunity to mention a bus route (yes, THAT one, yet again). It may seem somewhat irrelevant to walking routes as it has complications they (usually) do not, but a solution that handles this bus route well would probably be useful for other bus routes and other types of route. It's a very messy circular route. I don't see how any algorithm could correctly figure out the actual sequence of ways traversed unless they were sorted correctly. Three times it goes into a cul-de-sac, reverses into a side-road (that is also a cul-de-sac) then goes forward in the opposite direction from whence it came. In one place it does the same reverse-turn trick in the middle of a very long road because it doesn't go all the way. In another place it goes around four sides of a square, looping the loop. In one place it traverses the same sequence of ways twice, about 30 minutes apart. Even the drivers occasionally get it wrong. It's this: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/8592409 Even with a close inspection of the one-way streets along the route, it's impossible to figure out exactly the sequence in which it traverses the route. And yet the information is there (I hope, but there may be errors) in the ordering of the relation. We don't seem to have a tool that would let an ordinary user figure it out easily, but a user could (with a great deal of time and effort) use the query tool of standard carto to get the route, then work his or way through the list of ways in the route by clicking on them in turn, then returning back to the list each time. A slightly more savvy user would right-click on each way in turn to open it in a new tab, but it's still a lot of time and effort. At this point I had a thought. Given what we already have in standard carto's query tool, it would be a Simple Matter Of Programming[tm] to add a way of dealing with routes. When I say "SMOP" it could be anything from an hour of trivial coding to weeks and weeks of a complete rewrite, but that's just a matter of details and some Dunning-Krugeresque hand waving on my part. The way the query tool works is to return a list of nearby objects. Hover over any object in the list and it is highlighted in a browny-orange. Very useful. Suppose that sort of highlighting also worked with the list of ways in a route relation (as in the link above). The whole route is highlighted in browny-orange. But if hovering over a way in the list caused that way to be highlighted in a different colour, you could easily see the steps in the route and the sequence in which they are traversed (assuming it was correctly sorted, of course), by hovering your way through the list. Things get complicated with alternate routes and variant routes, but I'll just do some more Dunning-Krugeresque hand-waving here. Of course, we're always going to have routes that aren't sorted. Partly because some editors disordered routes (they seem not to do so these days, although it's possible they get confused by rare cases). Partly because some mappers don't realize they should do so (although mappers would tend to add the ways of a route in sequence and a good editor would maintain that sequence). Partly because some mappers think it's their mother's job to tidy their bedroom (sorry, I meant the router's job to make sense of what they've mapped). I suspect that if standard carto's query permitted routes to be inspected that way, more mappers would take care to ensure their routes were sorted. -- Paul
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