Talk:Long-distance footpaths in the United Kingdom

Separate Wiki sections for Long Distance Walking and Cycling Routes?

Unless this already exists, would it not better to provide a separate wiki for long distance cycle routes? There are a considerable number of them - disused railway routes, etc. and it would surely be more useful to provide a lookup just for cycle routes. The title of this wiki could then include 'walking' to make things clearer. Urbanrambler1 (talk) 19:04, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

There already is this page for the National Cycle Network: WikiProject United Kingdom National Cycle Network. It has links to pages for national, regional and local routes. Also, many of the routes on this "Long Distance Paths" page allow cycling (or horseriding etc), they are not just for walking. --Vclaw (talk) 20:44, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Shorter paths

Since I discovered that the Witton Weavers Way is in fact 4 short walks and not one long one, I feel embarrassed to have it on this page. Is there a page for named shorter walks? --AntonyW 20:52, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

This page caters for shorter walks as well. It's just poorly named. Think of "Long" meaning longer than your average neighbourhood footpath. --Gregoryw 22:51, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Viewing walks on the map

Is there an equivalent of the cycle map that highlights these walking routes? --AntonyW 20:52, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Nick Whitelegg has been mentioning recently that there'll soon be OpenFootMap, akin to OpenCycleMap. Here's his email: [1] --Gregoryw 22:56, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

The relation analyzer (which you get to by clicking the "check" link next to each route) gives you a slippy map with the completed segments of the relation highlighted --Neil Hoggarth 13:47, 24 March 2009.

Nop's Reit- und Wanderkarte (riding and hiking map, atm covering the german speaking regions) and Colin Marquardt's hike&bike map render hiking routes which are tagged with the matching OSMC-symbol. The unpatient can click here. :) Lonvia's hiking map also shows hiking routes around the world -- Malenki 01:08, 3 January 2010 (UTC) (hoping this will enhance route mapping quite a bit)

Trails with alternative routes

Some of the UK National Trails are not simple point-to-point walks with a single route between the beginning and end. One prominent example is the Thames Path which has both south bank and north bank alternatives between Teddington and Greenwich. There is also a choice of Thames Path routes at Shepperton (depending on whether the ferry is available). The OSM relation analyzer has some notes at the end of its report which suggest mapping primary version of the route in the one relation, and creating other relations for alternative routes. This presumably has the advantage that it is unambiguous how one goes about converting the relation into (say) a GPX file for the purpose of navigating the "main" route. Should those of us working on long distance footpaths adopt such a convention, or should we go ahead and add alternative routes to the primary relation? --Neil Hoggarth 14:27, 24 March 2009.

Relicense GFDL material while we have a chance?

Are we going to relicense GFDL-licensed pages such as this one to Creative Commons during the relicensing window? --Wynndale 15:59, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Tracks, Mapped and Labelled columns in the table for England and Wales

What do the Tracks, Mapped and Labelled columns actually refer to? I guess that tracks might mean that GPS traces have been uploaded for the route and Mapped is based on the length of ways added to the relation, but labelled? I assume that the single % column in the other table was the equivalent of the Mapped column only. Does anyone else think that the Tracks, Mapped and Labelled columns in the table for England and Wales should be merged into a single % Complete column as is done for Scotland and the National Trails? See Diary for more discussion. --Srbrook 13:06, 26 September 2011 (BST)

I'd say go for it. It seems to make the table more clear and anything that makes the aiki more usable is a good thing in my book. Martin Renvoize 11:33, 27 September 2011 (BST)

+1 I've never seen the point in those additional columns either. A single percentage value would eb much better IMO. Rjw62 23:41, 3 October 2011 (BST)

South West Coast Path

As of both yesterday and today, the relation analysis and display tools are all generating errors when dealing with the South West Coast Path relation: 69318 69318.

Any thoughts as to what is going on? StephenDawson 20:09, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

The relation given above is not the relation currently used, see the main page. Due to the length of the path the old relation you've given was very difficult to manage, especially when it was accidental altered. Following some discussion on the email list I created a Super-Relation for the path made up of sections used by the organising body. A seperate page has been created to show details of the Super-Relation - South West Coast Path. Edits are made to sections which are part of the super-relation --Jamicu 15:09, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Package path gpx in form suitable for Garmin (and perhaps other) gpx devices?

It could be that I'm missing something here, but it seems that to load a gpx path onto a Garmin gps device as a route, it needs to be divided into sections each not exceeding 500 points. Anything more than this is truncated, destroying the route detail. There also appears to be a limit of 20 (499 point) routes on the device at one time. If a naive user like me is to gain easy access to these Long Distance Path gpx's then they need to be pre-packaged for download to a Garmin gps device. The sections don't have to have any practical application other than limiting the number of points. Users who are not familiar with OSM mapping, or mapping generally, just want the route to follow without getting bogged down in the detail necessary to create these Garmin-compatible route files. As most Long Distance Path relations contain many times 500 points this may have general relevance. I don't know the limitations of other GPS devices in general use. -- Urbanrambler1 21:31, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree with your overall thrust that some means of making GPX files more accessible and appropriate to a wider variety of users would be a Good Thing. But personally I don't want my route split into multiple 500-point sections as that becomes cumbersome and suggests unnecessary detail for my own purposes – it also fails to give me start and ends points that I desire (unless I happen to be walking an entire relation in one go, which is unusual). Currently I download a full GPX (which may be, say, 200 km long), then on my PC split out the section I want to walk in a day, and if that section then has too many waypoints, I run it through GPSBabel to reduce the number of points to 200 which is usually plenty for a day's walk. But that's non-trivial and if some more automated system were available it would be very welcome. StephenDawson (talk) 20:20, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

I agree with all the above, and use GPSPrune in a similar manner. That's just not feasible for a non OSM-contributor with no interest in, or knowledge of, manipulating GPX tracks. However, having acquired a Garmin Etrex 30 I note that the limitations I mentioned are no longer valid because the newer models can handle a full-length track/relation (I don't use routes). There is a need to package some OSM 'products' to make them more visible and accessible to the wider public. Urbanrambler1 (talk) 16:16, 3 May 2013 (UTC)