[OSM-talk] (Proposed UK) National Cycle Map standard

[Dave Stubbs]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 4:41 PM, Stephen Gower
<socks-openstreetmap.org at earth.li> wrote:
> I'm not quite sure who is considering this, but
> http://www.cyclecheltenham.org.uk/map_standard.html claims to be "being
> considered as the basis for a national standard."
>
> The actual map looks pretty good for an end-user and exactly the sort of
> thing I want to see. However, I can see that trying to incorporate the data
> into the OSM model will be scuppered by people saying it involves too may
> subjective decisions.  Anyone got any suggestions for a tagging scheme that
> would allow us to use OSM data to produce maps to this Cheltenham Standard?
>

Well, it'll be scuppered by the nature of OSM data collection, rather
than the people pointing this out ;-)

The main problem with these systems is that they're generally not well
described when someone proposes something like "a new tag cycle_level
1 to 5 where 1 is easy and 5 is hard". This is obviously a lot better
thought out, ie: it actually ties it to some degree to a cycling
qualification that determines ability. But it's still going to have
the problem of how you make sure everybody is tagging using the same
baselines (ie: how much traffic is regarded as "moderate", how many
HGVs are "few", which is more important to the classification: number
of HGVs or road width?)

So feel free to tag roads as cheltenham_cycle_level=blue, but expect
half the people tagging it to get it "wrong".

The descriptions for each level mention quite a lot of properties that
make up each level. It may be possible to map some of these instead,
to achieve a more dynamic effect.

Dave