This mail is about the different (and incompatible) usages of the tag "highway=cycleway"
When the OSM data is less complete, the tag combination highway=primary/secondary/tertiary cycleway=track is used. For a road with a cycleway. This means that there is a track next to the road that has to be used for cycling. When you want to be more precise, you can map 2 (or 3) ways and tag the highway as highway=primary/secondary/tertiary and the cycle tracks next to it as highway=cycleway The problem with this tagging method is that the tag "highway=cycleway" is now used for two completely different features. A cycle track next to a road is something completely different from a cycleway where there is no other traffic around. from the bicycle routers point of view: with the less complete date, a primary road is avoided (even when it has a cycleway) in favor of a quiet (unclassified) road. When the data becomes more complete, the primay way suddenly becomes "better" than the unclassified. For the rendering, different rendering between a cycletrack and a cycleway should be possible. SOLUTIONS: the first sollution that you might think of is "use a relation". You could use a relation and relate the cycletrack to its road. This method has serveral drawbacks: - it's not easy to use relations as a beginner - a way can be split in many parts, so the relation would have many members which makes it difficult to maintain. What about the point where one way goes over in another? - it is a lot of work to add a relation for such a simple problem The second sollution could be "add a tag". The wiki says that adding "cycleway=track" is redundant when you use "highway=cyclelane"[1]<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:cycleway>. But you could use this tag to note that it's next to a car road. But this is not optimal: - adding a tag always costs some work - the tag is not so clear So the sollution "create a new tag" comes to the mind. I believe this is the preferred sollution, but* I ask your input about what the tag would be*. We could - create one new tag and leave "highway=cycleway" for the solitaire cycleway (which is the most used type). - or create two new tags for the different ways. This makes it easy to deprecate the old highway=cycleway tag and replace them by new. I look forward to all reactions.
_______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
