[Talk-us] cycle.travel US bike routing, and unreviewed rural TIGER

[stevea]

Paul Norman writes:
>The most important change is probably setting appropriate surface 
>information. I don't know the exact secret sauce magic of 
>cycle.travel, but surface information is very important for 
>selecting reasonable routes on a bike - or indeed, any non-foot 
>method of transportation.
>
>Also, keep in mind, most rural highway=residential from TIGER should 
>be either highway=unclassified, highway=track, highway=service, or 
>deleted.

EXCELLENT points, BOTH of these, Paul.  Unfortunately, surface tags 
are not especially widespread (in the USA, where I am familiar), but 
where found, they do make excellent choice points in bicycle routing 
logic.

Richard (Fairhurst), if cycle.travel/map's router logic is not paying 
attention to surface= tags, perhaps it should, as doing so truly can 
improve selected routes.  (Not that isn't a fine router already!)

Who knows, it's possible, even likely that OSM gets lots of new 
surface tagging if we have a router that pays attention.  (Data feeds 
usage, usage feeds data, ad infinitum).

SteveA
California