Hello folks, Route relation names aren’t in a great state, are they?
Let’s say that I want to render cycle route names on a map (because, well, I do). I zoom in on a way along the East Coast of Britain and I find it’s a member of this route: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9579 name=NCN National Route 1 Hm, ok. That’s not the name of the route, it’s a duplication of the ref (and network) - something we’ve known not to do with the name/ref tags for roads since time immemorial. No matter, there are other relations for the way, so let’s see if they’re any better: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9476069 name=EuroVelo 12 - North Sea Cycle Route - part United Kingdom 5 That’s _definitely_ not the name of a route. “part United Kingdom 5” is some OSM mapper’s shorthand. If I were to tell someone that I’m having a holiday on “part United Kingdom 5”, even someone who works for the route authorities at Sustrans or the European Cycling Federation, they’d look at me blankly. Anyway, this has a parent relation: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9476239 name=EuroVelo 12 - North Sea Cycle Route - part United Kingdom Nope, that’s not great either. It in turn has a parent relation: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1207220 name=EuroVelo 12 - North Sea Cycle Route That’s not good. It duplicates the ref and the network; it enforces arbitrary punctuation upon the data consumer. It is, I guess, the least wrong of any of these names. But that’s not saying much. This isn't just a British thing, or an NCN thing, or a EuroVelo thing. Refs in names are depressingly ubiquitous. Better still: there are hundreds of routes with something like ref=12-83, name=(12) - (83) - with the added brackets meaning you can’t even filter them out based on a simple match. Then there are routes called "Aare-Route (Etappe 3)” and "Alpenpanorama-Route- Etappe 6 (Thun-Fribourg)” and "[D10] Elberadweg [Abschnitt K] Dessau-Roßlau - Elster [linkselbisch]”. I wish I were making this up. The upshot: bad luck if you want to render the actual names of routes on a map. You can’t. A modest proposal: let’s use the name= tag in route relations for route names. Let’s use the ref= tag for route numbers. If it doesn’t have a name, it shouldn’t have a name= tag. Same as we do everywhere else. If you need somewhere for a mapper-facing route description (and I can see that you need that for “part United Kingdom 5”), then I guess the obvious place to put that is the note= tag. But let’s keep it out of the name tag; and let’s have a concerted effort to remove them from existing name tags. Richard
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