Swiss Hiking Confirmations

Switzerland has an extensive hiking trail network with 65000 kilometers of signed hiking trails. There are three kinds of trails: hiking trails (marked in yellow), mountain hiking trails (marked in white-red-white), and alpine hiking trails (marked in white-blue-white).

The trails are signed with four kinds of signs, amongst them diamond-shaped hiking confirmations. These are used to confirm the trail: if you get off the trail, you will notice, because you won't encounter any confirmation signs anymore. They also are used to confirm the correctness of the direction of signposts: should a signpost get rotated and point in the wrong direction, hikers would notice because they wouldn't encounter any confirmation signs for a while.

Let's compose those confirmation signs with PyTamaro!

Hiking Trail Confirmation

The hiking trail confirmation is a yellow diamond. The measurements are specified in the handbook of hiking trail signage published by Swiss Federal Office of Streets and the Swiss Hiking Trail Association. Here is the figure with the measaurements of a hiking trail confirmation:

The color is RAL 1007 "daffodil yellow", which in the RGB model consists of 232 red, 140 green, and 0 blue.

You probably saw two triangles. That's great!

The measurements of the triangle are given by its width and height. But the PyTamaro triangle function expects two sides and the enclosed angle.

You may want to decompose the diamond's triangle into two right triangles (top and bottom half). Those you can construct given the width and half the height.

You can use the right_triangle function from your toolbox (if you don't have that function in your toolbox yet, you may want to do the Triangles activity).

Mountain Hiking Trail Confirmation

Mountain hiking trails consist of three vertical bands in white-red-white. Here is the figure with the corresponding measaurements:

The two colors are:

• RAL 9016 "traffic white": RGB: 241-241-234
• RAL 3020 "traffic red": RGB 187-31-17

Alpine Hiking Trail Confirmation

The alpine hiking trail confirmation has the same structure as the mountain hiking trail confirmation. It simply uses different colors. Specifically, it uses blue instead of red for the middle band.

The two colors are:

• RAL 9016 "traffic white": RGB: 241-241-234
• RAL 5015 "sky blue" RGB: 0-124-175

What You Learned

You learned about one type of signage you encounter on the Swiss hiking trail network. This type of sign is very common. You should find one about every 10 minutes during your hike, and much more often in areas where the trail isn't clear.

You also (hopefully) practiced to structure your code so you can reuse functionality. The mountain and alpine confirmation signs are very similar. Did you manage to factor out the commonalities into separate functions?