TRF Forums

To be honest I haven't really been keeping up with this thread so i thought i should have another look at the map.

Perhaps I'm being thick (quite possible) or I'm missing something (very likely) but I don't get it.

Obviously I can see the map and I can se the coloured lines and read the key etc. The link to the explanations is also useful and the explanations themselves are pretty acurate but much of the map info itself is patchy, some of it is wrong and some is positively misleading.

I still don't understand the difference between a BOAT and a Byway (there doesn't appear to be one except the colour) and I can't see why you've included RBs if this is aimed at trail riders.

I might add that some of the info shown is just plain wrong and many legal lanes are missing. Where exactly does the lane info come from? From th eadmitedly small sample I looked at it doesn't appear to be very well sourced.

Now I know that all of that sounds very negative and I'm genuinely sorry about that. I know that what you are trying to do is positive and there's no doubt that the likes of TRAILWISE can be improved up on but there is a very serious point that needs to be made here.

There are legal as well as political implications to publishing information that encourages people to ride this track or that way etc. We should all be very careful about where we ride and where we encourage others to ride.

The key to any resource of this kind is accuracy of information. At the momment you appear to have some quality control problems. of course this is an issue that dogs any system like this so keep working to improve it because it could be good.

I hope you take this in the spirit of constructive criticism not as a slagging off.

Regards

Richard

Good idea to have a seamless map that can be zoomed in and out on, unlike Trailwise, but I have just checked out some of my usual riding areas, and it is so far extremely innaccurate. There are huge amounts of legal routes missing, and some illegal ones marked as byways, including a bridalway which is under the consultation process of a possible upgrade to BOAT or RB (Which knowing it's location, is very unlikely!)

well.. quit complaining about it and start editing it!:)

go to openstreetmap.com and create an account
find the routes in there and edit them so they are correct
bywaymap will pick up the changes next time peter syncs it


I've mentioned to him that BM should allow editing - it has the potential to be a massively more useful and clear version of trailwise, bywaydatabase.. it's just a work in progress at the moment. he's currently engaged in a discussion about how to represent the uk designations on openstreetmap anyway.. problems come because there's all sorts of crap in openstreetmap.. tags like highway=byway, this is deprecated and BOATs would be better off marked as highway=track,designation=byway_open_to_all_traffic possibly along with some access= tag and a surface= indication
Of course, we run into nuisances like there being no way to record a UCR as there is no designation= that supports the UCR and mislabeling them as byways wouldnt be a good idea. I've been skipping the designation tag if it's not a BOAT or an RB and relying on highway=track and access= to specify what's legally allowed. Having BM be able to quickly set these things would be handy but really the tracks do need marking out on OSM first (as a set of connected nodes in the road network) so BM's use would only be of limited form as its data is not live

I think the most important thing to appreciate is that BM downloads all the road network data from OSM, looks for the word "byway" in the highway or designation tags and then colours them as such where it can work out whether the road has been tagged as a BOAT, RB or other byway. In many cases this might not be the best way but that's being worked through

Just had a look at trailwise, how do I get a registration key from TRF?

Join & then ask the membership sec for a key.

http://www.trf.org.uk/membership/join-online.html