Name, alt_name, relations and routes for national walking routes

With regard to the Pennine Bridleway, the National Byway has a main-route-with-loops structure that is a bit similar (but longer) and there's a wiki page that describes how that's been done here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/National_Byway

A similar approach for the Pennine Bridleway may work, but it's probably a question for the talk-gb mailing list rather than here.

With regard to naming, what I wouldn't do is add e.g. "Mary Towneley Loop" as the name of any of the bridleways and tracks that that route runs on. In quite a few places near me people have started doing this with various routes, and unless that really is the name of the track (which is unlikely) it's not a good idea. Many tracks have their own proper names, and may belong to multiple long-distance routes, so for example there are tracks that are part of the "Mary Towneley Loop" and "Pennine Bridleway" (and sometimes the "Pennine Way" as well) but the tracks aren't actually called that.

1. I'm not sure "bridleway" is a proper value for the route tag. I'd probably go with "hiking", as that's what bridleways are used for nowadays. I could imagine highway=bridleway if the road type was distinctive enough to have its own category, but really highway=track (or whatever's appropriate) should be used instead.
2. The tools (mapnik, mkgmap...) aren't great at displaying/finding routes right now. Try contacting the particular tool's authors about routes (although I'm sure it's already on their long todo-list).
3. As a somewhat-satisfactory workaround, you can tag the way if a section of the route is exclusively used for that route (I've done that here for example).

IMHO we should differentiate in the mapping in order to try to represent the real world entities the best in OSM. I don't know this particular way, that's why I'll answer generally.

If there is a thing like "the Pennine Bridleway" that is a national route for equestrians then you can represent this in OSM with a relation type=route,route=horse (according to taginfo and the wiki) and after looking into taginfo also with network=national according to this proposal: importance. There is proposed network values for walking (nwn) and cycling networks (ncn) on the description of the route-key, but no suggestion for horseriding. I'd not continue this logics (e.g. nrn, national-riding-network) because it is not really self-explaining and uses abbreviations, and it doesn't seem there is any actual use of horse-specific network-tags.

If there are other routes for walking or cycling I'd make distinct route relations for them.

If there is routes with mixed designation (they are all the same network) things become more difficult. You might either

• make several distinct relations like above and then combine them into one object (relation)

• or you made one relation with multi-values in route (route=bicycle;foot;horse)

• or you used something like route=mixed together with access-tags (foot=designated, horse=designated, ...)

The first solution seems horrible to maintain (if the different means of transport variate at certains spots I'd definitely go for this), multi-values are not popular at all and the third alternative is not in use. Mixed is also ambiguous because the route tag is used also for other kind of routes (public_transport, ferries, etc.).