Thanks all, these are very good replies. I'll have to ponder for a bit. One complication that I should perhaps have mentioned is at the moment I'm doing a lot of the mapping based on NearMap aerial maps, so I can't actually observe local practice to see what's going on. Which is why I'm inferring as much as possible from things like the location of the path: near houses, or in the middle of the bush... Sometimes you can make out painted bike signs on the ground, sometimes you can't.
Another tricky aspect is that the rules about what bikes can do vary from council to council. It came up in the news recently that if you ride a bike in a park in the City of Melbourne (ie, the most central suburb), it's a $200 fine. No other inner city suburb bans bikes from parks... I'm still a bit confused by the notion of a "cycleway" - perhaps because we don't use that term here at all, we say "bike path". OSM is obviously an empirical process, and empirically, there is very little or no difference between a "footpath" and a "bike path": they're both paved, about a metre wide, and connect useful places together. In the absence of signs, I don't see how there would be any satisfactory way to decide whether something was a "cycleway" or a "footway", if those are the only two choices. And with so little to distinguish them, there must be a big grey area. I guess I've seen true "cycleways" in places like the Netherlands, where it's a genuine single-purpose path between two villages, crowded with bikes. But there is barely anything like that here - it's always multi-purpose. As an example: http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/Home/RoadsAndProjects/RoadProjects/WesternSuburbs/DeerParkBypass.htm Now, in common language, everyone would refer to this as a bike path. It clearly has great interest to cyclists, as does the whole network of "trails". But there's nothing about it that says it's a "bike path" - it's called a "wellness trail" and is for "walking and cycling". Instinctively, I want to tag it a cycleway...but there's absolutely nothing to justify that. Nowhere will you see any primacy given to cycling over walking. Conundrum. Steve _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
