[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - cycle expressways

[stevea]

> On Aug 6, 2022, at 1:03 AM, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
> ...Limited access is characteristic of expressways, but so is inconsistency.

As a fellow Californian who has worked with Minh (and others) on local freeway/motorway/trunk/expressway subtle distinctions over the years, this is quite well-stated.  I won't say "California seems to have fully gotten our hands around this in OSM" (perfectly, exactly, "yet"), but we have made good progress with dialog, wiki, proposals and tagging.  It gets better because we do the work (discussion, some argument, some wiki documentation, some changes to that and blowing away of the eraser crumbs...some clarity...a proposal or two...).  This is natural in OSM.  It is good to see and do.

> The American definition of an expressway [3] is so imprecise that, even though there's often a very prominent sign indicating the end of an expressway, there's never a sign indicating the beginning. The signs are not what make an expressway an expressway. Rather, the distinction is based on fuzzy attributes, such as access control and design speed; it's easier to tag an expressway if you don't think too hard about it. Unfortunately, the highway department would never respond to my typewritten letter asking which highways are considered expressways.
> 
> The cycleway=expressway proposal names several attributes that would be familiar to anyone who's had to tag expressways in the U.S. I offer my sympathy to anyone who finds it necessary to define a cycle expressway with scientific precision. Some things in life can only be classified by intuition. [4]

Rather than sympathy (actually, IN ADDITION TO sympathy!) I believe I well-understand the natural gravitation towards cycleway=expressway, having hinted at strong correlations between highway=trunk (rather than highway=primary and/or highway=motorway) needing an expressway=* tag (often with value yes, sometimes with value no).  There are reasons for doing this to "make consistent the trunk network" (as, for example, we are in the process of doing to 2.5 km of Mission Street [1] in Santa Cruz, California — surrounded by expressway=yes on both sides, but explicitly expressway=no, yet/also likely to be "upgraded" from highway=primary to highway=trunk in the near future).  There are reasons for wanting, as does Jens for good reasons, to "denote high-performance bicycle infrastructure" by coining a somewhat-similar (yet different!) cycleway=expressway.

We get it (well, some of us do, these are "chewy" topics — there are times and places where my eyes glaze over about distinctions between Norway and Belgium and I think I get it, but I'm not 100% sure).  But we appear to be in the beginning-middle of a lot of discussion about this so most or all of the wider world can be accommodated.  This is part of devising / implementing / using good tagging strategies so we "tag what we mean" because "we KNOW what we mean."  Knocking off the edges of fuzziness around these topics is difficult, but wider consensus can and does emerge.  Also, know that "super cycleways" are new in USA, Australia, Canada and "some" of Europe.  I'd say quite new, even "barely emerging."  I, for one, have my "eyes wide open" about this, and I coordinate routing (and good OSM tagging and route relation practices) on the OSM's USBRS data (like EuroVelo).

Jens, I urge an approach I learned (while riding a bike as a child, especially around rail tracks):  "Stop, Look, Listen."  There is a lot of dialog, a lot of countries, a lot of approaches, a lot of voices, a lot of signage, a fair bit of confusion (though clarity does better emerge, for example, about distinctions between infrastructure tagging, as I believe this is, and route tagging, which does muddy the waters, but is quite distinct).  These need to harmonize.  I think we are in earlier-to-middle stages of that, but I'm not sure a proposal is ripe / mature for wide acceptance until more clarity is achieved.

We make good progress so far, I do say again!  Let's not be too hard on ourselves for doing what is difficult and certainly is time-consuming.  This sort of work is necessary and pays dividends in the future with both clarity and "room to grow."

[1] https://www.osm.org/way/259681820