[Talk-us] Tagging and Rendering Cycle Ways

Scott Atwood scott.roy.atwood at gmail.com
Wed Nov 26 01:27:44 GMT 2008


I am an avid cyclist in the San Francisco Bay Area and I have recently
started editing my local area in OSM.  I would like to map all the local
bike routes and facilities, but I'm not sure of the best way to tag them in
OSM.  Here are the different kinds of facilities I have encountered, and my
best guess at how to tag them.

Bike Lanes (a.k.a. Class II).   This one is pretty easy.  I just tag these
as {cycleway=lane}, and they render quite nicely in the Cycle Map layer.
 The one problem I've encountered so far is that the existing tagging scheme
doesn't seem to handle bike lanes that are only one side of a two-way
street.  This is not a common situation, but it does happen.  A similar
problem would apply to sidewalks and on-street parking that are only on wide
side of the street.  Has anyone proposed a solution to this class of
problem?

Multi-Use Paths (a.k.a. Class I).  This one is also pretty easy.  I tag
these as {highway=cycleway, cycleway=track, foot=yes}.  However, one wrinkle
is that these MUPs sometimes have have sections with an on-street alignment.
 In that case, I added a relation to the entire MUP, both the off-street
trail portions, and the on-street alignments, that was tagged like
{route=bicycle, type=route, name=_name_of_the_MUP_}.  I intentionally left
off the network tag from the relation, since this isn't part of a formal
route network per se, but if anything, it would be {network=lcn}

Bike Routes (a.k.a. Class III).  This one, I'm a little bit more confused
about.  These are just streets that have "Bicycle Route" signs on them, and
nothing more.  Often, they overlap with Bike Lanes.  They have no names or
numbers associated with them.  I've never seen any formal map that shows
bike lanes.  I've only ever stumbled across them while out on rides.  They
tend to have approximately the quality of cycling conditions as Bike Lanes,
without the stripe, of course.  But they are distinctly at the lowest tier
of cycle facility.  I have typically been tagging these as
{bicycle=designated}.  One of the other local cycle mappers has been tagging
them with a relation like {route=bicycle, type=route, network=lcn}.   I'm
not sure which is a better approach.  My tagging scheme feels more in line
with the spirit of this type of facility, but I suspect that to date no one
is giving this a distinct rendering. The latter scheme seems OK too, but
perhaps implies a bit more status to these routes that feels appropriate.
 Also, I suspect they may render even more prominently than Bike Lanes,
which doesn't seem quite right.

Local Numbered Cycle Routes.   In my local area, there is only a single
numbered local bike route, San Jose Crosstown Bike Route 11, which I
implemented as a relation like {network=lcn, ref=11, route=bicycle,
type=route}.  This tagging feels about right, and renders the way I'd expect
in the Cycle Map.

Bicycle Boulevards.  To the best of my knowledge, there is only one Bicycle
Boulevard in the local area, the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard, on Bryant
St. in Palo Alto.  As far as I know, no one has added the Bicycle Boulevard
to OSM yet, and I'm not sure what the best way is.  Probably a relation is
the best tool to use, but I feel like a Bicycle Boulevard ought to have a
distinct rendering, since it is distinguished by lots of cyclist friendly
features like diverters for motorists, traffic calming measures, and cyclist
signal priority.

I guess what I would really like is a richer set options to use tagging and
rendering bike routes, besides just lcn/rcn/ncn.  To some extent, Class III
Bike Routes, bicycle boulevards, and the on-street alignments of MUPs are
all appropriate use cases for bicycle route relations, but to me at least,
feel like they should be tagged and rendered distinctly from routes that are
part of an official local cycling network.

Thoughts?  Opinions?

-Scott

-- 
Scott Atwood

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.  ~H.G. Wells
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