Option to Auto Plot on Private Paths, Bridleways and Tracks

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• Jonathan Stuart Sunday 03 Mar 2019 09:39:25

  Hi,

  I use Auto Plot extensively when creating walking and running routes, but many of the bridleways in my area (and, I suspect, more genearlly in the UK) are tagged incorrectly in OpenStreetMap and aren't marked as allowing walkers. Auto Plot won't use these bridleways. When I find these bridleways I update the access tags in OSM but it can take weeks for plotaroute to be updated with OSM updates. I assume that process can't be made faster. If not, then could an option be added to Auto Plot to allow plotting on private paths, bridleways and tracks? The user would have to take repsonsibility for checking whether they can access those routes, but they should do that anyway. This would also be useful for anyone who has access to private land and wants to plot a route.

  Is this possible?

  Thanks,

  Jonathan

• plotaroute admin   Monday 04 Mar 2019 09:25:02

  Hi Jonathan - it isn't really feasible for us to add the extra auto-plot option that you suggested, but we can certianly look into increasing the frquency that we apply OSM updates to our routing engine. Its a very lengthy process to do these updates, as we offer routing for the whole world, but we'll look into what's involved.

  John 

• Jonathan Stuart Monday 04 Mar 2019 13:35:18

  Thanks John, I appreciate you looking at this.

  Jonathan

• Graham Davis   Saturday 13 Apr 2019 14:26:21

  It seems to me that all bridleways are not routable.  All the green dashed paths (openstreetmap) won't let me route on them.  These are publically accessible paths, for example, through Epping Forest.  Is there no simple way around this?

• plotaroute admin   Sunday 14 Apr 2019 07:56:32

  Sorry Graham, we haven't found a simple solution for this yet.  Bridleways currntly need to be explicity tagged as permitted for walking on OpenStreetMap to be routable with our auto-plot feature. I believe that for some countries like Germany, pedestrian access to bridleways is not allowed by default, so we'd have to find a eway of overriding this where we know the default permissions are different. We'll have another look into it. 

  John

• Jonathan Stuart Sunday 14 Apr 2019 08:39:24

  Unfortunately this does make plotaroute of limited use in many parts of the UK where public rights on highways way are poorly recorded on OSM. The AutoPlot functionality already allows us to change between Road, Bike and Foot. Presumably that works by looking at what access rights exist on OSM and using that to determine valid routes. Isn't what we need an even simpler variation where instead of checking the correct rights exist for Road/Bike/Foot, the access rights are ignored altogether? i.e. don't check for which rights exists and plotaroute would just plots on whatever path, bridleway, etc, exists? In this mode it becomes to the user's responsibility to check they can legally use the route.

• plotaroute admin   Monday 15 Apr 2019 09:48:47

  Unfortunately its not that simple Jonathan, as we don't have that level of control over the OSM routing programs. We will have another look into how we might be able to circumvent the issue though.

  Meanwhile, another option would be to consider Premium membership - Premium members have access to Google maps on the desktop route planner, so the auto-plot feature will use Google for routing when plotting on a Google map rather than OSM.

  John

• plotaroute admin   Thursday 13 Jun 2019 09:55:24

  We've managed to overcome the problems with plotting walks or runs on UK bridleways - Auto-Plotting "On Foot" should now work on all UK bridleways, even if pedestrian access tags are missing on the OSM database.

  John

• Julian Beach   Friday 01 Nov 2019 15:31:52

  Sorry to resurrect this!

  I've had this problem locally too. It now works most of the time for running / walking, but not for cycling.

  The comments suggest that this can be resolved by ensuring that OSM bridleways are explicitly tagged for bicycles? It does look like that is the problem locally, and as the route I am thinking of is part of the National Cycling Network, it is definitely OK for cycling.

  As I am an OSM contributor, I am happy to ensure that my local routes that include bridleways are appropriately tagged where cycling is allowed. Will this resolve the routing issues, or is there more that needs to be done? I can also check this out on the OSM forums if this has not already been done. Just to be clear, for Auto-Plot to work on bridleways for running / walking and for cycling, the routes need to be tagged for pedestrian and bicyles, as apprpriate?

  Julian

• Jonathan Stuart Saturday 02 Nov 2019 10:00:24

  My understanding is that before the change announced by plotaroute below, walks would only autoplot where there were explicit rights for walking recorded in OSM. That has been changed such that autoplot works for walking even where rights for walking aren't recorded. However, autoplot still won't work where walking access is marked as private in OSM. From my tests, it looks like that change was only made for walking. Routes for bikes can, presumably, only be plotted where OSM included explicit rights for bicycles.

  Updating OSM to include missing access rights for bicyles doesn't partcularly help because plotaroute doesn't use "realtime" OSM and cuts are taken infrequently. Plotaroute suggested below to use the premium version because then Google maps can be used for plotting. I would use premium if it fixed this problem but Google maps are no use because the level of detail for off-road paths and tracks is limited.

  In an ideal world plotaroute would use more up-to-date versions of OSM and there would be a checkbox option to ignore OSM access rights and plot where no access rights are recorded or they are marked "private". I would upgrade to premium for that. If that's not possible then the best workaround may be if plotaroute will allow bike plotting where no cycle rights are recorded, although I assume it still won't plot on ways marked private. But this may need to be an option that can be turned on/off otherwise people will unwittingly plot bike routes on footpaths, etc.