[Tagging] Cycling infrastructure routes (was Re: cyclist profiles - was:Feature Proposal - RFC - value 'basic_network' - cycle_network?)

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 21:19 2021-11-30, stevea đã viết:
> On Nov 30, 2021, at 10:51 AM, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
>> Vào lúc 02:58 2021-11-30, Brian M. Sperlongano đã viết:
>>> In the US, I even struggle to come up with a clear definition of what counts as a "route" for cycling.  Certainly our signed and numbered "US Bicycle Routes" are routes, but there are many, many dedicated off-road bicycle paths that extend for considerable distances while carrying a common name (and would be mapped as multiple ways based on length and changes in attributes).
>>
>> If we were to strictly apply the standards we use for roads, then we'd nix the route relations for dedicated bikeways that aren't part of designated routes. On the other hand, that's distinctly unhelpful for mapmaking, since from a user perspective, the dedicated bikeways are often more usable routes (in the ad-hoc sense) than the designated routes.
> 
> Yes, but I'd argue that "nixing" would be too strict.  DESIGNATED routes, absolutely go in OSM.  There certainly are more (in the USA) that are "less formal."  I don't think we want to remove those, but I recently removed a really messy allegedly-mtb route (which was obviously copied from a copyrighted web site) that went from the San Diego International Airport down through Tecate (taking mostly paved roads there) and then got "sort of on dirt trails" as it went into Mexico.  I deleted it, noting so in the USA's International section of Bicycle Networks wiki, the author did not complain.  (I did try to contact him first; no reply).

Right, I was only *hypothetically* pointing out that deleting those 
relations would be consistent with road infrastructure, which is almost 
never modeled as a relation. (Some mappers do map street relations, but 
that's quite a niche at the moment.)

>> The current approach of representing them all as route=bicycle relations gets messy as dedicated infrastructure gradually becomes part of designated routes. For example, the Little Miami Scenic Trail in Ohio [1] has a well-known identity, so we made it into a coherent network=lcn relation. [2] We need a route representation because it unfortunately still has a couple of on-road gaps, as well as a short segment with a different local name. [3] People still follow the named bikeway instead of the concurrent U.S. Bike Route or state routes that are more fragmented. This relation is distinguished from those routes by the lack of cycle_network=*. None of the network=*cn tags fit well, but there's a pro-forma network=lcn on it. Maybe in time it would become informal=yes and eventually be deleted.
> 
> I underscore once again the importance of infrastructure tagging.  It is de minimus (the bare minimum required), and an OSM bike route that doesn't have bicycle infrastructure tags on its members is "posing," and must be fixed so it does.  Even then, the route SHOULD be signed, but might not be, in the USA we are a bit lax about this.  But not the converse:  if it is a signed bike route (whether national, regional/state or local), OSM has every reason to map it as a route=bicycle (or even a route=mtb, we have signed mountain bike routes pretty close to me, I've hiked them).

In this spun-off thread, I was floating the idea of distinguishing a new 
kind of relation for cycleway/bikeway infrastructure, in addition to the 
infrastructure tags we'd of course keep on ways. The named trail I gave 
as an example is signposted -- but not as a route per se, rather, in the 
manner that a street is signposted. Yet people routinely follow the 
trail as if it were a route, overcoming any discontinuities in the 
physical trail. I recognize this is orthogonal to mapping the kind of 
network that started the original thread. It just seems that overloading 
route=bicycle for this purpose is inconsistent with both road and rail 
mapping.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us