Traffic planners typically measure motor-vehicles-per-day (and quote it to the nearest thousand), so I'd do traffic=<1000, with advice somewhere that you can use 1000* off-peak cars-per minute as an approximation.
10* motor-vehicles per peak-hour is also a common rule-of-thumb (but I wouldn't propose standing around for an hour to measure it). Richard On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Richard Fairhurst <rich...@systemed.net> wrote: > Hi all, > > Sending this to talk-gb@ first (rather than tagging@ or talk@) as I'm just > floating an idea... > > I've long wanted to get motor traffic levels on rural roads into OSM. > Traffic levels make a huge difference to the enjoyability of rural cycling, > and would enable really fun rendering and routing possibilities. > OpenCycleMap could highlight quiet minor lanes even if they weren't in the > NCN. CycleStreets could prefer them. I could do a lovely cycle touring map > in the style of the old quarter-inch OS maps. And so on. > > Traffic levels are, also, a real pain in the saddle to record. > > OSM's iterative; always has been. We start as a broad-brush survey and get > more detailed as time goes on. So it doesn't matter if we don't get detailed > hour-by-hour traffic averages to begin with - it'll get better once people > are used to recording it. But how to do that? > > Looking at some Sustrans and Countryside Agency design documents, it turns > out that they share a criterion for quiet lanes: 1000 vehicles per day. > Let's say (remember, we're talking really broad-brush here) that traffic is > reasonably even between 6am and 10pm, i.e. 16 hours, and absent at other > times. That's 1000/16=62.5 vehicles per hour. > > One car per minute. > > So, how about it? Find a country lane. If you're standing there at a typical > time of day, and there's less than one car per minute, that's a quiet lane. > Tag it traffic=quiet, or if you'd like to be precise, traffic:hourly=<60 (or > whatever). Really simple. > > We could do great things with this. As time went on, no doubt people would > get into surveying it with more and more detail. Comments welcome! > > cheers > Richard > > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-GB mailing list > Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb > _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb