On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Nathan Edgars II <[email protected]> wrote: > Perhaps it's best to think of the cycleway tag as a newspeak term for > anything cycle-related, whether properly called a cycleway. A street > with an unmarked narrow strip becomes a cycleway=lane when signs are > posted or symbols are painted. A street becomes a cycleway=sharrow > when symbols are painted. It might have been better had we used cycle > rather than cycleway as the tag, but we're probably stuck.
Nicely put - I think this is what I was trying to say earlier. I find the "newspeak" easy because "cycleway" is not a term used here at all. Pieren wrote: > In Europe, this thing is unambiguously tagged bicycle=designated. >I proposed to put an additionnal "sharrow=yes" to make it more precise if you >like. If "you" have a good argument >against using well established tags which >perfectly fit here, then "you" have to explain why you don't want to use >them. >You are replacing an access tag "bicycle=yes/no/designated/etc" by a physical >descriptor tag "cycleway=lane/track/etc". A sharrow is nothing else than a >normal lane for cars with a bicycle painted on it. Almost all car lanes are >shared with bicycles, it makes no sens to create a cycleway=shared or >shared_lane if it is not separated from the normal car traffic The trouble with this "established practice" is that it works because the abstract tags like "designated" in practice mean something quite concrete: a certain kind of signage on bike paths or roads, due to national or even international standards. In Europe. In Australia, we don't even have city-wide standards: every council does things differently, so we are generally much keener to tag on a physical level (this is physically a bike path, or it's physically a road with lane markings), because ultimately it's the physical level that the cyclist cares about. What good is it following a "designated" route if in one council that means Copenhagen-style bike lanes, and in another it means sharrows? Steve _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
