How to deal with routes that consist (mostly or entirely) of a mix of existing paths/ways in OSM that are infrequently signposted

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Forking from another discussion:

RfC: Have pathless hiking routes (no trail_visibility) be a type of node_network instead of paths

(veering slightly offtopic from “pathless” routes into “verifiability if no signage”) Unmarked trails will usually fail the verifiability test and on that basis should not be in OSM. The tricky bit is where do you draw the line? Often trails are “well known” (similar to what @IanH suggests) even without on the ground markings. In the UK, the Lyke Wake Walk and Wainright’s Coast to Coast were historically largely unsigned. I’ve added guideposts et al to both OSM relations from survey and as …

RfC: Have pathless hiking routes (no trail_visibility) be a type of node_network instead of paths

(just to clear this one up**) no, not really. I’ll not use the word “trail” in what follows because of the obvious double meanings that has. This route was created by a person who wrote a book about it. Most of the OSM ways it goes over are obvious paths (mostly trail-visibility=good or better). None of the paths are informal=yes in the OSM sense. Other routes over the same OSM ways are very well signposted - the ways aren’t tagged as such in OSM, but if they were you’d tag each way as tra…

I noticed something similar on Gaia GPS (which is a US centric product that incorporates OSM as well as other sources) near Moab UT. While there aren’t any nodes in OSM, they have pulled in some “overloading” information recently from other sources and I assume that this is where the following set of “route nodes” comes from:

While on the Gaia GPS example above the markers are just put down on set distances, I could see some way of working this into guideposts. at junctions, though some of those would have to be abstracted.

I’m not aware of any path/way that has more than two routes on it, so having labels on a route could get noisy from a visual standpoint in an area which has a lot of different ones. The cleanest visual way would be to have routes alongside the ways/paths ala Acadia National Park.

updated this original post to be more focused on the specific issue.

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Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/how-to-deal-with-routes-that-consist-mostly-or-entirely-of-a-mix-of-existing-paths-ways-in-osm-that-are-infrequently-signposted/99129