[OSM-talk] Cycle lanes

[Dave Stubbs]

>
>  > * Rendering engines could handle it much easier if it were just a
>  > cycleway=* tag added to the road.
>
>  Please show me the simple rendering algorithm for mapnik and osmarender you
>  have envisioned to make this working for all the special cases above. Until
>  you do, I keep believing the opposite is true, since it is fairly obvious
>  from the existence of Andy's cyclemap and the experimental Dutch cyclemap
>  that they have absolutely no problem rendering cycleways that are drawn as
>  separate ways.

In general if Mapnik supported rendering a displaced line then a large
number of the cases get covered. It already supports rendering line
labels displaced, so it's not completely impossible. There are always
edge cases that cause problems. And people reversing the direction of
a way is a mistake, pure and simple... we have to consider way
direction important otherwise oneway streets will never work... so
hopefully people aren't going round randomly changing directions.

For me the biggest current problem for rendering cycleways is
indicating when a cyclist loses priority. Here in London there are a
load of cycle tracks and shared paths where you lose priority over
traffic from side streets if you're using it... this is really
irritating so it's often better to cycle on the road. But on-road
cyclelanes nearly always keep the priority as they are considered part
of the main road, so it's worth knowing where they are. So we do need
to fix this rendering issue anyway.