Additional area metadata to include parkings, trail heads coordinates and approach trails

[vnugent]

What would you like to be able to do? Please describe.
Currently we have a free-text description for an area and its latitude/longitude (which only makes sense for a small crag).
As a user I want have more detailed information such coordinates of parking lots and/or trailheads as well as approach trail GPX.

How important is this to you (Please pick one)

• Important

Proposed GIS metadata for an area

parkings: # can have 1 or more entries
- name: P1
  description: Trail head parking lot # optional field
  coordinates: [lat, lng] # required field
- name: Visitor center Parking 2
  coordinates: [lat2, lng2]
  description: 

trails:
 - name: Approach trail 1
   gpx: <data structure> # TBD

Related issues

• Location or Approach field for Areas #1051
• Area coordinates should be nullable and null should be default #1057

[UvixCreative]

Personally, I would vote that a trail be either link or ID for a "way" or trail in OSM, as opposed to GPX data. I feel like full-on map data for trails is outside the scope of OpenBeta as an application, and as a result it would be lacking in terms of end-user experience due to lack of good data.

However, I do really like the idea of having a field for parking lots or trailheads.

I'd love this to have a dedicated schema (partly for searchability and partly to prompt contributors to link this data), but I would argue this is a relatively low-priority feature request. Reason being that using markdown for descriptions already allows a contributor to organize the description into multiple sections, including a section for access descriptions/links (the way I did here)

[hcars]

@vnugent I'm interested in taking a stab at adding the parking areas. Is anyone else already working this issue? In addition, to the lat, long fields I think that adding an optional photo pairing would be helpful as well as cost of parking.

parkings: # can have 1 or more entries
- name: P1
  description: Trail head parking lot # optional field
  cost: $ amount # required field, default to free
  photo: # optional field
  coordinates: [lat, lng] # required field
- name: Visitor center Parking 2
  coordinates: [lat2, lng2]
  cost: $ amount # required field, default to free
  photo: # optional field
  description: 

[pamolloy]

I strongly agree that this data is already in OSM (see Tag:amenity=parking) and when parking is currently missing it should be added there.

I think this would be less of an issue if the current tiles (i.e. maptiles.openbeta.io) were updated to use either existing tiles or a custom set. The current ones lack topo and cliffs, and also don't render trails very well. The default OSM tiles include cliffs, but not topo. Thunderforest Landscape includes both.

And how it is currently rendered on openbeta.io:

Additionally a lot of people do not realize OSM exists and continuously try to reinvent the it.

[musoke]

@pamolloy, do you know much about generating custom tiles, etc? The tiles you show are a big enough improvement that I think it's worth opening a separate issue to track them.

You may also be interested in the tag climbing:url:openbeta - a few of the cliffs in your screenshot are already tagged with it.

[vnugent]

Mapbox Outdoor base layer does show OSM cliff data. The default Light layer is very simple to minimize distraction.

https://openbeta.io/maps?camera=17/38.03836/-109.54629 (then switch to Outdoor)

[pamolloy]

How to get to the crag (i.e. parking, trails) is as important to me as the climbing grades, etc. It seems like an odd thing to qualify as a "distraction". I imagine effectively no users will know to switch layers to find topo, parking lots, better trail styling, cliffs, etc. Would you consider switching to "Outdoor" as a default?

And it is MapTiler, not Mapbox. A small typo, but very different products. 😄

Is there a way to request changes to the MapTiler styles? Is there some kinda of configuration that could be stored on Github so people can contribute?

[vnugent]

@pamolloy I think we misunderstand each other here.
The map has several base layers similar to other map applications. The default layer, aka minimalist/distraction-free is intended to minimize other features/labels (town names, highways, administrative borders) so users can have a "big picture" visual of where all the climbing areas are located. Feel free to submit a PR to set Outdoor as the default layer.

Is there a way to request changes to the MapTiler styles? Is there some kinda of configuration that could be stored on Github so people can contribute?

We use MapTiler base layers as is. We have a backend job that generates 2 additional tile layers: crags and crag groups, and overlay them on top of the base layer. The styling is done on the fronten. What changes do you want to make to the tiles? Can you please open a separate issue? Thanks!