okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Mapping "one-way" trails
I've been working on a mountain bike orienteering map. The area is small and flat with mainly single track trails that run along the river. The trail system is essentially a big loop of a one-way trail. This raises a mapping problem that I'm trying to solve. How can I best show a one-way trail?
My current solution is below. The purple arrows indicate the direction you can ride. I'm not really satisfied but I haven't come up with a better solution (yet).
I've also considered showing the direction of travel arrows with bright green. I was worried that purple would get confused with the course and an orienteer wouldn't even notice it. On the other hand, the same thing could happen with the green.
The east-west trail in the map above is 2-way travel. I'm thinking that I may need to have something to indicate that on the map. One thought was to highlight the 2-way trails with a series of purple dots paralleling the trail to indicate that 2-way travel was allowed.
I'm thinking the best solution might be to field test a couple of options and ask the orienteers what they thought.