I'm one of the people mapping paths (since March) who scans this list, and I have to say that I'm confused. Although part of that may be because I'm new to OSM and not just to the matter of how to deal with tagging and rendering things. And part of that may because a lot of the tagging conventions developed in Europe, where the cycling infrastructure is often much better than in most of the United States.
I got into OSM because I think it and its associated community of spin-off applications provide the best opportunity for most communities in the US to enable citizens to generate routes so that they can plan trips by bicycle. The cycling infrastructure in most parts of the US is discontinuous, poorly mapped by public agencies, and consists of a mix of types: shoulders along roads designated as bike lanes (no curb to the outside); similar but undesignated shoulders that cyclists discover but are not "official"; lanes marked within streets, often adjacent to outside curbs, but sometimes between lanes of motor-vehicle traffic; sidewalks (footways) parallel to major streets, which were built with the intent of being used by cyclists; traditional sidewalks that were not but which may be used by cyclists except where prohibited; dedicated paths/trails built separate from the road right-of-way, which may be used for utilitarian travel but which often are located where they are used primarily for recreation rather than "real" trips (most of which are designated "multi-use" and are used by cyclists and pedestrians); and the majority of roads, which cyclists are legally entitled to use, but which are not specially marked, and which may or may not be unsafe to ride. It is common to have cycling infrastructure on one side of a street but not the other; some types may be safe for two-way cycling, but others, such as shoulders and most in-street lanes, definitely are not. Where the street is divided by a median, as in a boulevard, it is easy to code the street as two one-way paths, code the cycling infrastructure separately on each, and let the oneway=yes tag take care of this. Where the street is a two-lane, two-way street with a shoulder or lane on one side, clearly intended to be used in one direction and not the other and no cycling infrastructure on the other side of the street, there is a problem. This is common in Tampa, and I welcome guidance. Some questions about coding: I assume that highway=cycleway is a path developed outside a road right-of-way, primarily for cycling (and the topic that you have been discussing in this thread). The illustration on the Map Features page lacks enough surrounding context to indicate whether the tag might be suitable for other kinds of cycling infrastructure. If I am correct, then what would be the difference between this and cycleway=track? Cycleway=lane, the illustration shows what could either be a bicycle shoulder or an in-street bicycle lane. These have very different perceptual "feel" to cyclists, depending on the character of the main road, the motor traffic on it, the volume and speed of the motor traffic, and the geometry of the lane or shoulder. On one street here, there is a lane (officially, "excellent" cycling infrastructure) which most cyclists veer out of to use the shoulder instead, which at that point is not designated as a bike shoulder, because there is a lane. If you saw the section of street, you would understand why. Cycleway=track would cover the multi-use, largely recreational, infrastructure. It might or might not be intended for the sidewalks intended to be used by cyclists. Cycleway=opposite_lane is rare here, and in the US is probably only suitable for low-volume streets except in areas with large numbers of cyclists, such as Portland, Davis, or Boulder. See below. Cycleway=opposite_track again might or might not be intended for the sidewalks intended to be used by cyclists, which often are on just one side of the street. Unfortunately, research has demonstrated these to be dangerous when cyclists who use them against the flow of motor traffic must cross an intersection (because drivers are not looking for them there). I have attempted to tag some of the multi-use paths as highway=footway and as highway=cycleway, but only the most recently entered survives. Most of the multi-use paths with which I am familiar have been entered by others and tagged as highway=footway. What is the best way to designate their multipurpose character? I assume add bicycle=yes. Thinking ahead toward the objective of having routing algorithm available to use this to generate bicycle routes, how can we code these various types in ways that someone can eventually make usable routes out of them? If you are aware of anyone developing such a routing facility to run using data from OSM, could you refer me to him/her? At the moment, many large cities in the US have no OSM mapping activity at all, and in most of those which do, it is fragmentary. It would be very good to get this sorted out before lots more people here become involved. Ed Hillsman >On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:59:50 +0100, Andy Allen >[email protected] wrote: > >Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Rendering of footways with bicycle=yes >To: Richard Mann <[email protected]> >Cc: [email protected] >Message-ID: > <[email protected]> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > >On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Richard Mann ><[email protected]> wrote: >> I'd support that highway=path needs to be rendered in the cycle map layer, >> especially now it's becoming clearer how it's being used > >Every time it gets discussed, it becomes *less* clear how it's being >used to me. And I'm mightily concerned that the 10 people discussing >it on these lists might be in no way representative of the 14,990 >people who are mapping paths and aren't in these discussions. > >Cheers, >Andy
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