[Tagging] bicycle-no on motorways

[Steve Bennett]

On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Dave F. <davefox at madasafish.com> wrote:
> Around my area in the UK a user is presently adding bicycle=no to all
> motorways. There was a discussion a while back whether it that tag was
> implied for motorways. If I remember, it was claimed there were some places
> (not UK) that allowed bicycles. What was the consensus?

There are definitely plenty of motorways around the world that allow
bicycles. Where I am (Melbourne, Australia), they do by default -
those that forbid them have signs saying so.

IMHO, the approach "the wiki says that in country X, Y is the default,
therefore I don't need to tag it" is excessively optimistic. Until
there is an automated, easy mechanism for querying defaults (ie, a web
service), it's much safer to tag explicitly.

Also: yes, someone should make such a web service. Something like:

get_default_for_way(way_id, key_name)
=> returns implicit tag value for the specified key_name, or "" if
none can be deduced.

get_default_for_way_by_tags(lat,lon, way_tags*, key_name)
=> returns implicit tag value for the specified key_name, if the way
were subject to the jurisdiction at lat,lon, and had the given
way_tags.

For that matter, a whole range of interpretive services would be
really useful and give renderers, editors and mappers some certainty.

Steve