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Comment by mpol | Hacker News Reader

Oh, one other thing. Many volunteers are maintaining and guarding hiking routes and cycling routes. These get damaged easily (I just did that yesterday myself) and these volunteers sometimes carry a big burden. The big companies don't have an interest in these routes "by the people, for the people", there is no money in that. If they get more often damaged, it will not be regarded as funny by these important long-lasting volunteers.

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Is this virtual or real damage? As in, the trail route is imperfect and misleading about the actual trail, or the trail is revealed via the map and others come and physical use damages the trail. The second reminds me of land owners sneakily putting "no trespassing" on land that is legally publicly accessible (I think this happened in Sausalito about a year ago)

There might be many situations, but I was mostly talking about virtual vandalism. When you edit points, lines or routes in the wrong way, they get damaged. The volunteers guarding these need to fix them themselves, which can be a burden and they can get emotional already. You can imagine how that goes when more damage gets done where the fixing is left for those volunteers.

I don't know much about land-owners doing vandalism, often people try to communicate, sometimes this works out okay.

It's often as simple as mis-tagging. I do a lot of mapping of mountain bike trails (think narrow, hiking-type trails which are also open to bikes) and these are designated as paths (highway=path), open to cycles (bicycle=yes or bicycle=designated) and some mountain biking-specific tags.

What'll often happen is a well-meaning person will come by, often using an editor that doesn't differentiate between types of bicycling, and change the route to be tagged highway=cycleway. This is the tag for things like paved bike paths, such as urban cycling infrastructure.

The result is now these mountain bike trails, narrow/rocky/tight/steep stuff, shows up in tools that offer bike commuters directions. Just... not great.

So many of us keep an eye on the stuff in our area to see that the tags stay as they should.

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