[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - value 'basic_network' for keys 'network:type', 'lcn' and 'lwn'

[Richard Fairhurst]

I can definitely see the value in a tag along these lines. I've encountered several situations where a city has a signed network of connections for cyclists, clearly directing people along particular roads/trails - but they're not point-to-point routes as such, and don't have names or refs. We don't have a good way of tagging these yet.

Three examples I've encountered:

Cambridge, England. There is a carefully planned network of connections, signed like this (apologies for G**gle): https://goo.gl/maps/6RQKGvNnVsFucBSD6, https://goo.gl/maps/KPx5VHimVCVo99fP7, https://goo.gl/maps/yLaUeRjbNUUf3av37 (connection to King's Hedges signed off NCN 51).

These are currently mapped as https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/12218549 which is just wrong: it's not a "route" and it isn't officially called "Cambridge signed cycle routes network". But we don't have another solution.

Cardiff, Wales. The signed routes were tagged as lcn=yes which worked fine for the local mappers until OpenCycleMap (for understandable reasons) stopped rendering that. The local mappers don't know what tags they should be using instead, and I couldn't give them a good answer.

Flagstaff, Arizona. There is a network of routes, some of which are named but others are just connections, called FUTS (Flagstaff Urban Trail System): see https://www.flagstaff.az.gov/1379/Flagstaff-Urban-Trails-System-FUTS. It's in OSM as https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2815833. It was previously mapped as route=bicycle, type=route; I changed it to type=network in 2019 because it wasn't a route. I am slightly surprised no one has shouted at me for that yet. ;)


So we have something factual here that could be mapped, but currently no agreed way to map it. JochenB's proposal is a good start and identifies the issue.

The main problem with it is that network:type=basic_network is really not a great name. It's not intuitive from the tag what it is; it could honestly mean anything. The second problem is that it's based on type=route, but that means 'point-to-point route', and these aren't - they're networks.

So why not just do this:

	type=network
	route=bicycle
	network=lcn

Exactly the same as a point-to-point bike route, but with type=network rather than type=route. It does what it says on the tin ("type=network", of which there are 3.3k already), it's simple, and it accords with existing tagging.

Richard
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