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overriding footpaths

8 Oct 2020
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Hi,

cycle.travel doesnt allow long stretches of footpath to be used in a route, presumably because its forbidden.

However some of the footpaths are actually large paved or gravel tracks traverse-able by car. They appear correct in OS and Openstreetmap but not on the cycle.travel map. This means I cant create a cross-country route that is in reality perfectly fine for bikes.

If the map cant be changed, is there any way of overriding the footpath routing prevention?

thanks

Comments

Mon 12 Oct 2020, 16:41

Often the cause is that the path hasn't been marked ("tagged") properly in OpenStreetMap.

In particular, in the UK, if it's marked as a track (highway=track), it needs to be expressly marked as open to bikes (bicycle=yes). Without that, cycle.travel won't route along it – basically because I don't want to send people down private tracks! Fixing this in OSM will fix it in cycle.travel next time a routing update takes place.

But if the path is genuinely closed to bikes, and you want to plan a route along it nonetheless, you can do this:

  • Add a via point at the start of the section
  • Add another via point at the end of the section (there'll probably be a long looping route between the two)
  • Click on the first via point and choose "Go direct"

cycle.travel will then draw a straight line between the two.

Thu 22 Oct 2020, 16:57

Many thanks for your reply Richard.

The 'direct via' is a neat little hack to get routes looking much more realistic, so thanks for that. Every day is a school day.

With respect to getting data correctly tagged in OSM, is it a case of emailing the developers (which im guessing would be a long shot) or is it like a wiki which you can adjust yourself and submit changes?

Mon 26 Oct 2020, 08:53

colnolshoe, you can create an account and then edit the OSM yourself.

Wed 11 Nov 2020, 11:41

Thanks guys, it was actually quite simple to edit OSM and add the correct tags.

The routes I tagged are now available for correct routing since the mapping update - brilliant stuff!

I shall be an active editor from now on lol.