[Tagging] [OSM-talk] Cycle lanes & cycle tracks - my findings and a proposal

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2012/5/23 Richard Mann <richard.mann.westoxford at gmail.com>:
> Now if we had an editor that displayed some parallel lines if you put in
> cycleway=track, and maybe something similar on the standard rendering... A
> fancy renderer might take further tags about the degree and nature of
> separation into account, perhaps even interpolating between values on nodes.
> That's all entirely extensible.


I don't think that storing interpolation and angles in tags is a good
idea. You do not need _one_ editor in order to keep the data intact,
you would need _all_ of them to support this, or at least all that
allow to modify streets.


> A botched
> lets-just-put-it-all-in-a-relation-and-hope-someone-writes-an-algorithm-to-decipher-it
> is probably just creating data, and destroying information.


I think that this is a misconception, because it would all be on
dedicated geometry, not in the relation. In the relation you could put
(optionally) detail information like the height of the kerb (or more
generally the nature of what is between the ways) or which ways are
linearily connected, what we mostly don't collect at all for the
moment. For many applications it would also be OK to not evaluate the
relation at all and still you would get all information that is needed
(because the highway-center line is kept). On the other hand you would
get (if you wanted) the information, that you can cross the street
there even if someone has mapped the sidewalk explicitly (something
people are already doing, and which is actually destroying some
information).

cheers,
Martin