You know what can really mess up carefully laid plans? What can even lead to a dangerous situation? When you get to the crossing of the South Fork Trinity River Trail and the East Fork South Fork Trinity River, a waterway that very much is still a river, and that bridge that someone has assured you they know is there is not there. There’s not even the evidence of once having footings for a bridge.

Apparently the mapper knew based on Bing aerial photography. Through thick trees. I can make guesses about how that crossing goes, too. At least when I guess wrong, I know it was a guess and might have made contingency plans around it.

Fortunately in the early days of Autumn, that ford I was LIED to about is just 4m of knee high wading without much current. That river comes out of some mountains that collect snow. It isn’t always so low.

The thing is, if it is important, it HAS to be correct. Your guess isn’t good enough. If it isn’t important, it can be left until someone who knows feels like doing it. There’s no renderer having trouble deciding how to render this crossing. It’s quite common that they aren’t specified.

I’ve been coming across a lot of guesses lately. I know they are guesses because they are wrong.

I was looking over an area I’d been working on when something started feeling wrong. It took me a couple minutes to notice that one of the roads I had aligned recently had sprouted four bridges. What? It was the unimportant spur of an unimportant low standard Forest Service road. They also get referred to as “unimproved” roads. We’re talking a road that might be produced simply by running a blade across the dirt. The whole thing probably cost a fraction of the cost of a bridge and suddenly it had four. Based on Bing imagery again, in which you can clearly see it is just a dirt road.

Why did this person do this? Well, they don’t like to see errors on the map. IT’S NOT AN ERROR. They were using iD, which uses yellow colors and the term “issue” for this sort of thing. It uses red colors and the term “error” for errors. You know what is an error? Fake bridges. But no automated error catcher is going to see those.

They added that “we can’t have” people just drawing roads over waterways without saying how they cross. Well, the road is there. The waterway might be. I’ve seen these NHD lines climb over ridges, so it’s debatable. But let’s assume the waterway is there. Seems more important that they are on the map than that we know how they cross. We can’t just leave roads off because we don’t know how they cross the waterway.

I was adding in details along a trail I’d just hiked in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park when I noticed the beautiful curving footbridge across Hope Creek was marked as a ford. What? Then I found some more fords marked where I knew there are permanent bridges. Most were on inconsequential crossings, but 3 were on Prairie Creek where I know there aren’t fords. Prairie Creek swells in the winter to something that would be chest high at least to cross. Telling people this is a ford could change their plans in ways that are unnecessary. Where exactly those bridges are, I can’t quite remember. Unfortunately, the creek isn’t aligned well. The trail should be.

Moving over to Redwood National Park, I found bridges on the abandoned logging roads that predate the park. Popular way for loggers to cross waterways: dump dirt on it and let it wash out next winter. These are only summer roads anyway and there’s more dirt where the first came from. It’s not good for the salmon downstream, but loggers aren’t known for caring about salmon. Anyway, some of these roads still exist, some don’t because they’ve been actively removed, some don’t because the forest is good at erasing them. None of them beyond what’s already been marked as trail is in legal public access areas, but for emergency purposes it would be nice to know what’s there. I’d actually stuck a question asking if we should keep these tracks tracing USGS lines and the person adding the bridges had answered (in a changelog), of course, we wouldn’t want people to have to get out the old USGS map to follow them. This is a person who clearly trusts the USGS map even when the latest one is from 1970 and many of the quads don’t even know there’s a National Park there. Frankly, if you want to follow an overgrown, vanishing road, you better not be too lazy to get out the USGS to do it.

So anyway, when you’re looking at iD nag you about crossings and making it so easy to add in a bridge or a culvert or a ford and even getting ready to pat you on the back to say how many crossings you’ve resolved, please remember that fourth option: “ignore this issue”. It’s a very valid response! When these are important, they have to be right! If they aren’t important, they can wait. There can be consequences to guessing wrong. Don’t guess. Please please please don’t guess.

And if you “don’t like seeing errors on the map”, well, getting it wrong is an error. Leaving it is just an issue.