[Tagging] Can highway=cycleway be limited to MTB?

[Andrew Harvey]

On Thu, 2 Apr 2020 at 22:41, Snusmumriken <snusmumriken.mapper at runbox.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, 2020-04-02 at 22:24 +1100, Andrew Harvey wrote:
> > just usually only a certain kind of bicycle.
>
> Well, that's the problem, if one can't travel on a certain way with a
> general purpose bicycle, then it shouldn't be tagged highway=cycleway
>

That's a bit like saying if you can't drive on the road with a general
purpose car, if you need a 4WD then it can't be highway=primary, which is
generally not the case. This is backed up by
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway#Assumptions

To quote:

"Only highway=motorway/motorway_link implies anything about quality. Other
road types, from highway=trunk through highway=tertiary to
highway=residential=residential/service or
highway=path/footway/cycleway/track do not imply anything about road
quality. In area with poor infrastructure road forming main road network,
of the highest importance in region should be tagged highway=trunk - no
matter whether it is high-quality wide asphalt road or narrow low-quality
tract worse than highway=service in other regions. Some primary roads in
Africa are unpaved.

In absence of surface, tracktype and other tags describing quality of road
one may try to extrapolate this information from value of highway tag. Note
that this needs tuning for every region. Typical highway=primary may be
drastically different in various places across the planet.

It is highly recommended to add and use tags describing road quality like
surface. In one region it may be obvious that all highway=tertiary are
paved and highway=track unpaved but no assumption like that will work
worldwide. Also, tagging at least some common values allows to
automatically build set of defaults for each area."

I guess end of the day if we say highway=cycleway can only be used for
paved urban bicycle paths and not mountain bike tracks,
bicycle=designated + mtb:scale=* could still be used to find mountain bike
tracks regardless of the highway key, it's just this is not what current
usage and the wiki says and makes it harder to distinguish shared paths
from exclusive mountain bike tracks.
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