[Talk-ca] Tagging sharrows (On-road markings for bicycle-automobile shared lane)

Darren Ewaniuk darren_ewaniuk at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 19 05:06:32 BST 2011


This summer, the city of Edmonton is marking some streets to designate bicycle use on them.

On portions of these streets that are wider, they have one driving lane in each direction and are painting the outside lanes off and designating them bicycle lanes (hence one automobile lane and one bicycle lane in each direction).
These appear to be straightforward, and I am marking these as:
  cycleway=lane
  bicycle=designated
  lanes=2

On other portions of these streets which are either narrower or require turning lanes onto a more arterial road, or on smaller streets, they are putting up "Share the road" signs and are painting a sharrow on one lane in each direction to indicate that the marked lanes are shared automobile/bicycle.

What's a Sharrow - http://bikehugger.com/post/view/whats-a-sharrow

I can't seem to find a consistent convention for tagging sharrows in OSM.

Some information indicates just to mark that this street is designated for bicycles:
  bicycle=designated
But this doesn't really indicate that the road is explicitly marked and intended as a route for bicycles, since by default bicycles are allowed on all streets.
Hence routing software will not likely prioritize these streets when planning a bicycle route.

Other messages indicate to be specific and tag the street with sharrow=yes to explicitly specify there is on road markings for a shared bicycle lane:
  bicycle=designated

  cycleway=no

  sharrow=yes



And yet other messages indicate that not all shared roads or all countries have painted sharrows and that the shared lane be marked as cycleway=shared_lane
  bicycle=designated
  cycleway=shared_lane

What have other Canadian OSMers been using?

For my changes so far, I have used the "sharrow=yes" tag.

An example is 97 Street NW around 63 Avenue NW:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.49945&lon=-113.48005&zoom=17&layers=M

97th Street NW North of 63 Ave has sharrows
97th Street NW from 62 to 63 Ave is tagged as having 2 lanes each direction with Sharrows
 (In reality, northbound is 2 lanes with sharrows, southbound is 1 lane traffic + separate bicycle lane, but short of splitting this in two ways there is no way to tag this)
97th Street NW South of 62 avenue has separate bike lanes (1 traffic lane + 1 bicycle lane southbound, 1 traffic lane + 1 bicycle lane northbound)

What tagging convention should be used here?

 		 	   		  
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