[Tagging] Tagging for streets with sharrows?

[Steve Bennett]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> 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