[Talk-us] Tagging and Rendering Cycle Ways

Alan Brown adbrown1967 at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 26 03:48:55 GMT 2008


My inclination would be to want an extra class of routes or two supported with different network type (perhaps "unlcn" for "unnumbered local network"?) for the lowliest of bike routes.   I'm not what I'd want done for expressways.  Perhaps there could be a way to tag a road as treacherous for bicyclists, that's still legal to ride on  - or add a warning POI.  I'm not sure if that sort of information belongs in OSM, as it's subjective, but it would be helpful.

-Alan




________________________________
From: Scott Atwood <scott.roy.atwood at gmail.com>
To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 6:21:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Tagging and Rendering Cycle Ways

One other thing I'd like to add:

Expressways.  Here in Santa Clara County, we have a quirky system of roads called "Expressways", which lie somewhere between normal arterials and freeways.  They tend to have few or no frontage driveways and a limited  intersections.  There are some freeway style interchanges.  Pedestrians are prohibited for the most part, but bicycles are permitted on all of them.  Most of them have wide shoulders, and a few even have bike lanes on the shoulders.  Some of these expressways are excellent routes for moderately confident cyclists.  I have no idea how these expressways should be tagged for cyclists, and any suggestions are welcome.

-Scott


On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Scott Atwood <scott.roy.atwood at gmail.com> wrote:

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





-- 
Scott Atwood

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