[OSM-talk] dangerous cycling lanes (was Re: A new highway

[Peter Miller]

The Cambridge Cycle Campaign cycle journey planner offers 'quiet' and 'fast'
options. Most people choose quiet.

Try it out here:
http://www.camcycle.org.uk/map/route/


Ways can currently have attributes about width, traffic, surface, noise and
danger etc. We can add hints about how nice, fast or dangerous they are.

Junctions can be flagged a 'dangerous' for cyclists (some are on our local
official cycle map).

It will be possible for the router to make some judgements of its own, for
example:

A cycle route crossing a main road without traffic lights will be more
dangerous than crossing a minor road or crossing a major road with traffic
lights.

Traffic lights will slow you down, but might save your life.

Roundabouts generally score badly for safety.

Corners and bends are worse that straight on.

Steep hills are not so good, especially if they end at the bottom on a main
road.

Down and up is worse than flat.

A cycle route on a cycle track beside a road will be slower than on the road
because of the side roads coming across it (the router can count the number
of crossings).

In some cases there will be the option to walk on a path, cycle slowly on a
share path or cycle fast on a dangerous road. The speed, danger, and ability
to turn on to other roads will be different according to what you are doing
and can be modelled.

It will then also be possible, using Frederick's relationships or whatever,
to specify that a particular manoeuvre at a junction is dangerous or that a
particular manoeuvre on a junction is safe to override the default.

Within OSM I am currently adding cycle lanes, tracks, racks, signed routes
and the 'ncn=yes' tags locally to the model and hope that someone will then
produce a route planner to use it all.

Btw, I have been asked to participate in a working group established by the
UK Department for Transport to set the data standards for a UK cycle journey
planner. Other attendees will be from MDV (who do the TfL planner), TfL, WS
Atkins, Ordnance Survey, CTC and the Cambridge Cycle Campaign. I will be
bringing an OSM perspective to the agenda and it is really useful that we
have been making such good progress recently. The first stage will be to
identify how all the current players model their worlds and see what the
commonality is. OSM will of course do it own thing regardless as it always
does:) but that it is the fun of it all, while other people talk about what
to do OSMers get on a do it!



Regards,




Peter


> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:10:46 +0100
> From: Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net>
> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] dangerous cycling lanes (was Re: A new highway
> 	tagging scheme - thinking about)
> To: graham <graham at theseamans.net>
> Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
> Message-ID: <46D43AF6.7000600 at acrewoods.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> graham wrote:
> > What do others do about this kind of thing? I've been putting off doing
> > much mapping of cycling routes at all because I don't know what the best
> > solution is. Having one-person censorship (effectively what I'm doing)
> > is also not good.
> 
> I've been holding off from all things cycle-related except for ncn/lcn
> routes and cycle parking for similar reasons. I'm waiting until somebody
> develops a way to really describe a place from a cyclist's point of
> view, including.:
> 
> - routes (cycle networks)
> - facilities (lanes, parking, crossings)
> - safety (width of roads and lanes, bad junctions, accident black spot)
> 
> How desirable a way is for cycling is pretty subjective and
> mood-dependent, I don't much like the routes that the TFL route planner
> suggests (though it's excellent software nonetheless). But if you have
> the above data visualised, or as options in a route planner, then you
> can at least say "give me an extremely safe route from X to Y" or "give
> me the fastest route, I'm a semi-suicidal maniac, but warn me about the
> nasty bits".
> 
> At the mo we seem to have a lot of that stuff available in proposed
> features or accepted tags, but I'd rather wait until some people put it
> together into a "here's how to map for cyclists" guide that is
> definitive (by OSM standards),
> 
> Kind regards,
> Tom
> 
>