[Talk-us] Tagging and Rendering Cycle Ways

[Alan Brown]

To the extent it's been documented, let's refer to the Wiki:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features#Cycleway

In this case, the photo of a "cycle track" is narrow like a path, with a stripe going up the middle.

Now, my turn to make subjective distinctions :) ...

I'd mark something a "highway=cycleway, cycleway=track" if a seperate path is primarily used by bicycles, and is used as a regular transportation artery.  In other word - paths going through town that people bicycle commute on - Guadalupe River Trail, Los Gatos Creek Trail, Highway 237 trail - would be marked this way.  Walking paths through parks, mountain bike trails up in the mountains - thoses would be paths.  At least, that's how I'd make the distinctions.  I can't think of any "bicycle paths" where pedestrians aren't allowed, and don't legally have the right of way.

I think it's important to not let the current rendering schemes of the normal mapnik style or cyclemap dictate these distinctions.  Rendering styles can be changed in minutes; data takes ages to modify.  The data should be focused on describing the condition on the ground.

(Having said that, I think I'll remove the "forward" setting on many of the elements I had marked up as a "type=route, route=bicycle, network=lcn" relations, when the direction is implied, and it's seperate carriageways on a boulevard.  Cyclemap rendered last night, and it makes it look like one-way roads if you zoom out.)

A lot of these distinctions are easily arguable.  The feature wiki should be fleshed out a bit with example photos, and best practices definitions.  In Potlatch, if you draw a line with no attributes, and click on the little "attribute icon" that changes from a car, to a pedestrian, to a bike, etc, and go for the "cycle track" preset, it creates a combination of "highway=cycleway" and "cycleway=track". combination.  The ready presence of this combination is why I've tended to use it often - presets are a way of getting people to enter data in a standard way.  Perhaps we could request some extensions to the potlatch presets as a way to encourage standard practices.



-Alan



________________________________
From: Karl Newman <siliconfiend at gmail.com>
To: David Carmean <dlc at halibut.com>
Cc: atwood at cs.stanford.edu; talk-us at openstreetmap.org
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 9:35:24 AM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Tagging and Rendering Cycle Ways

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 9:15 AM, David Carmean <dlc at halibut.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 05:27:44PM -0800, Scott Atwood wrote:

...

> 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}

How did you decide upon this scheme?  I've been working on sections of the
SF Bay Trail, some of which even allow horses.  I've been tagging these
primarily as {highway=path|track, foot=yes, bicycle=yes, horse=yes|no,
surface=paved|gravel|dirt}.  The choice of "path" or "track" has been a little
imprecise.

Your scheme seems better. A multi-use path is exactly what highway=path was intended for. It's not primarily for any mode of transportation, but pedestrians, bicycles and sometimes horses are all allowed. As for path vs. track, I think of track as something like a fire road or similar, something that is occasionally used by wheeled vehicles, usually with special permission.

Karl
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