[Talk-GB] Quiet lanes and "one car per minute"

[Kevin Peat]

Richard,

I think in my part of the SW the large majority of highway=unclassified
would be <=1 car a minute average so just from a tagging perspective it
would be a lot easier just tagging those few that are busier.

Kevin






On 20 January 2011 12:48, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Sending this to talk-gb@ first (rather than tagging@ or talk@) as I'm just
> floating an idea...
>
> I've long wanted to get motor traffic levels on rural roads into OSM.
> Traffic levels make a huge difference to the enjoyability of rural cycling,
> and would enable really fun rendering and routing possibilities.
> OpenCycleMap could highlight quiet minor lanes even if they weren't in the
> NCN. CycleStreets could prefer them. I could do a lovely cycle touring map
> in the style of the old quarter-inch OS maps. And so on.
>
> Traffic levels are, also, a real pain in the saddle to record.
>
> OSM's iterative; always has been. We start as a broad-brush survey and get
> more detailed as time goes on. So it doesn't matter if we don't get detailed
> hour-by-hour traffic averages to begin with - it'll get better once people
> are used to recording it. But how to do that?
>
> Looking at some Sustrans and Countryside Agency design documents, it turns
> out that they share a criterion for quiet lanes: 1000 vehicles per day.
> Let's say (remember, we're talking really broad-brush here) that traffic is
> reasonably even between 6am and 10pm, i.e. 16 hours, and absent at other
> times. That's 1000/16=62.5 vehicles per hour.
>
> One car per minute.
>
> So, how about it? Find a country lane. If you're standing there at a
> typical time of day, and there's less than one car per minute, that's a
> quiet lane. Tag it traffic=quiet, or if you'd like to be precise,
> traffic:hourly=<60 (or whatever). Really simple.
>
> We could do great things with this. As time went on, no doubt people would
> get into surveying it with more and more detail. Comments welcome!
>
> cheers
> Richard
>
>
>
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