Trails want to be free

06Jun07

A friend showed me Bikely, a great site that makes it easy to make and share maps of bike routes. People have submitted all kinds of routes, from low-traffic commuting to multi-week tours. It’s really great to see that mapping is slowly being included in the range of user-generated content the Internet has to offer. Check out this map I made of my route for biking home from Ottawa to Pembroke.

Seeing the enthusiasm with which people are willing to share their routes came at just the right time for me, as I’ve spent many frustrated hours at my new job staring at a wall of guidebooks for New England hiking trails, which as my co-workers happily tell would-be hikers, are absolutely necessary for setting out on a trip – this is one kind of information you cannot Google.

This reminded me of the special grudge I hold against the cartographic stinginess of the Rideau Trail, a 300-km hiking trail from Kingston to Ottawa. Not only does the Rideau Trail Association lack a map on their website, when I picked up their guidebook in a store, I saw that the book was sealed shut to prevent any knowledge of the trail changing hands before a full purchase was made. I’m not sure what they were afraid of – speed-readers devouring the guidebook in the store and then hiking for 10 days by memory?

I realize that the Rideau Trail Association, like many trail maintenance organizations, probably relies on revenue from their guidebook to keep their non-profit running and the trail in good shape. But if you’re a non-profit devoted to looking after a particular public good, is limiting access to knowledge of your public good (and in the case of hiking trails, knowledge essential to appreciating the value of said good) really the best fund-raising model?

Some quick searching reveals that many popular trails also offer very little information online (see the Bruce Trail, the Appalachian Trail, or the Trans-Canada Trail, whose website seems to be as unorganized as the trail itself). A little better, if low-tech, is the West Coast Trail.

Being the Wikipedia geek that I am, I think what’s needed here is not only online information, but free information – both in the sense of not costing anything and in the sense of being open to reproduction and modification. Since trails are a common resource, information about them should be too; more importantly, the success of Wikipedia and similar projects show just how doable volunteer-driven knowledge projects are.

It seems to me that hiking trails have the perfect formula for an open access project: enthusiastic volunteers + readily available technology. The former come in the way of those people who love their trail, and will do anything to promote it, be it talk your ear off or work on a website. The latter comes in the form of GPS units – which many outdoorsy people already have, and allow relatively easy DIY map-making.

There some pre-existing projects which are similar, but not identical, to what I’m thinking of:

• Bikely’s companion website for hiking, StepWhere, is a Google Maps overlay. Pros: lots of inter-operability with GPS units. Cons: the fact that it uses Google Maps means it can’t be freely reproduced the way any open project should be, and this is not a collaborative work at all, just a bunch of routes posted by users and no editing abilities. I suspect that Bikely’s popularity comes from people tracing over roads, rather than raw GPS data, like most hiking trails would require.
• Wikitravel is the Wikipedia of travel guides, and I’ve contributed to it from time to time. It would probably love to incorporate trail coverage and maps, but when you read up on their map-making, you can see they’re (we’re) still struggling with basic city maps, so detailed trail maps is a bit ambitious, I think.
• OpenStreetMap is the closest thing I’ve seen to the trail-mapping I’m describing – it’s the Wikipedia of atlases, user-created and fully editable. Pros: demonstrates how much fun it can be to play around with a GPS, and how it is possible for maps to be made through collaboration. Cons: After poking around their site, I was thoroughly confused – seems to have a steep learning curve. Oh, and they kind of seem to be focused on streets. Beyond that, if I were starting an “Open Trails” project tomorrow, I would mimic OSM.

Perhaps I’m just being cheap, or should spend some time photocopying the Carleton library’s copy of the Rideau Trail guidebook instead of whining, but in the era of information saturation, it irks me that this area of knowledge has yet to be shared.

Regardless, the next time I head on a hiking trip, I’m bringing a GPS along in the hopes that the data I grab can be shared in some useful way. I’ll be an explorer of uncharted intellectual property.

Filed under: cycling, intellectual property, tech, travel, wiki   |  3 Comments