Handling for hiking routes

[ZeLonewolf]

Currently, hiking routes are rendered exactly like highways. How do we want to handle hiking routes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E4_European_long_distance_path
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Blue_Trail

https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7176710

[Mashin6]

I guess this will have to do with decision about the purpose/focus of this map. If it's mainly for car navigation then I think better might be to have hiking trails as an optional layer along with other features necessary for hiking (contours, peak elevation, shelters,...). Otherwise I fear that it will get over-cluttered really fast.

It will though require some adjusting. It makes more sense to "categorize" relations based on osmc:symbol rather than network tag. This might still be quite a lot of symbols to draw. Maybe making a color replacing function would simplify things a bit and we would need only basic symbol designs that will get colored on the fly.

(And there is still an alternative to show colored lines along the paths rather than symbols.)

[gdt]

I lean to having substyles for purposes. I found a hiking symbol on a state highway in my town, and I was totally unaware that a hiking route existed -- and I maintainlocal trails in OSM. So I favor omitting them on road maps, except for truly significant trails like AT, PCT.

I think a hiking style that shows roads but less strongly, and shows hiking trails with colors from blazes, trail map style, and also doesn't loudly show sidewalks until z18/z19, would be a great thing. With vector tiles, the resource intensive part can be shared. Probably bicycle map, and urban pedestrian map are other styles.

[SK53]

Worth looking at how SomeoneElse's style handles hiking routes (admittedly a map with a specific hiking focus). Obviously there will be technical differences between doing this in vector & raster tiles, but it avoids issues with unexpected shields on highways.

[1ec5]

Once we show trails (#216), we should show shields for hiking and cycling routes, even along roads. It’ll look less weird once we have actual artwork for these routes.

But in order to show that artwork, we’ll need to know the route’s network. Unfortunately, OpenMapTiles doesn’t expose the value of cycle_network, and there’s no established tagging scheme for the specific network of a hiking route, only the generic lwn/rwn/nwn/iwn scheme that’s useless for choosing a shield. On the bright side, that scheme would be useful for suppressing local networks’ shields until a higher zoom level, avoiding the issue of marking a route only along a short concurrency.