ael <witwall3@disroot.org> writes:
Feel free; I don't expect that to go well.
As far as I can see, the current discussion is just a special case of a general problem with OSM. Consider a park with grass cover with open access, or even just an area of, say open access moorland where it is possible & sensible to walk anywhere. As far as I know, all the OSM routers will fail to construct a route across such a place (presumably a straight line) in the absence of an explicit way of some sort.
Adding a relation of the sort I suggested which would be verifiable and objective would solve the problem. Is there a better solution?
I didn't say your idea made no sense. I said that I didn't expect the discussion to go well :-) But don't let my guess stop you. I prefer soemthing like a polygon of type highway=path that covers the free-routable space, to which regular ways are connected to. Sort of the same thing, but without adding relations in, and treating free-routable areas as first-class items similar to line-routable ways.
Of course, routers would not pick this up immmediately. As for mkgmap, I see that the Garmin firmware probably needs to support it somehow. Are we sure that Garmin doesn't have something that can interpolate between routing points? I guess that navit could probably be extended to do this sort of thing.
My impression is that people synthesize a bunch of diagonals when there is an erea, for routers that don't do areas.