Someone in my area is starting up a new website that is focused on cycling in the city. They have decided to use OSM as their map which is awesome. The question is: are there any tagging conventions to indicate how dangerous a particular stretch of road is to cyclists? They want to produce a map of the city that highlights the dangerous roads to avoid in order to show how they act as barriers and make it very difficult to move around town on a bicycle. I could also see a different map that highlights the safest roads and paths. It seems like this information would also be useful to routing services to be able to come up with bicycle specific routes that avoid the "certain death" roads.
I see a "hazard=" tag but it doesn't seem to be used very much and is a little too general for what I had in mind. Perhaps hazard:cycle= with some kind of hazard level indication would work. I could see using numbers (0=safe path or bike lane, 1=residential/low traffic road, 2=bigger roads with higher speed traffic, 3=avoid at all costs) or some other string based identifier if that is deemed easier to understand. Some of this information could probably be implied by the highway= tag but that is a pretty incomplete picture. There are parts of the same road here in town that vary between different levels, usually getting far more dangerous when they hit a hill and start curving around. Also, there are several highways leading out of town that are similar to each other except for traffic flow which makes some of them absolutely wonderful to ride on while others are a death trap. I realize this can be somewhat subjective but I think there could be pretty good consensus among cyclists in a given area. Since I haven't found any tags on the subject I'm assuming there is no renderer support for such a concept either so I may end up trying to do some custom rendering which is another topic entirely... But I'm thinking if there is a consensus on this then support for it could be added to opencyclemap, hikebikemap, etc. Thoughts? Toby _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
