[Tagging] cyclist profiles - was:Feature Proposal - RFC - value 'basic_network' - cycle_network?

[stevea]

Grazie! Lo sto leggendo adesso.  (I'm reading / scanning it now).  I think it's great this was started in 2009!

It looks a bit different than how we do it in the USA, where at the national level we're solidly complete, but as we don't drill down to the state / regional levels (and especially local level) we don't enumerate everything, it would be far too huge in a single wiki.  There is a trend for a state or a county (state subdivision) to exhaustively list all of its bicycle routes (like Santa Clara County [1] and San Mateo County [2], California, or statewide in California [3]).

That seems like it could work for countries at "about Western European size" but seems it could get unwieldy at USA-size (both population, ~330 million and geographic, a good chunk of North America).  Remember, OSM is making this up as we go along

What we do instead at those "middle and lower levels" is to list some open-ended rules for how you might choose to do this in YOUR state (dear OSM bicycle route mappers / wiki writers), like using the two-letter postal abbreviation at the state-level in the cycle_network=US:XY value (for XY).  "Rough guidelines," and they seem to be getting followed over the last eight, nine, ten years (at middle and lower levels).

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County,_California/Cycling_routes
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/San_Mateo_County_Bicycle_Routes
[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/California/Cycling_Relations