[OSM-talk] Non-designated cycleway vs. designation info missing

[Roy Wallace]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Martin
Koppenhoefer<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/15 Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com>:
>> Could the definition of "official" be simplified to "signed"?? If not,
>> what would be the difference between bicycle=official and
>> bicycle=signed?
>
> As I have understood, official is intended to tag the formal
> dedication (usually of the local administration who decided to build
> the way). In some cases there might be missing the sign, but it still
> would be officially dedicated to be a xy-way.

The wiki says "'Official' is stronger than 'designated'...'Offical' is
only for ways marked with a legal traffic sign".

My question stands - I still don't see much of a difference between
'official' and 'signed'.

> Bicycle=signed is IMHO not the best idea, because what do you do for
> official or designated _and_ signed ways?

As I mentioned before, you would have to change the syntax to
something more like bicycle:designated=* and bicycle:official=*,
bicycle:signed=*, etc. Alternatively, change the tag definitions so
that the issue doesn't occur, or make one imply the other(s) - e.g.
signed implies official implies designated (we do already have
"'official' is stronger than 'designated'", so the latter is more or
less already true).

> Also I didn't get the difference of designated and official. Maybe you
> can explain? I thought it was intended for the same situation.

Please see the wiki. Eventually I gathered that official is what you
think it means, whereas designated is more of a "recommendation" as in
"this way is designed for *". The wiki definition makes only vague
references to "signs", but then the examples all heavily reference
signage. This IMHO is confusing. I don't like the current situation -
but that is what we have at present.

> There is people already using tags like this:
> traffic_sign=DE:237
> to tag signs. If you put this on a way it would be clear that and how
> a way is signed.

Hmm. I think that is for tagging traffic signs, not for tagging ways.

Basically, my main concern is that the examples on the wiki for the
access=* tags extensively use traffic signs (which is a good thing!),
but at the same time the access=* tag definitions make little explicit
reference to signs. In other words, if a way is signed with, say, a
picture of a bicycle and a picture of a pedestrian, I think it should
be straightforward for a newbie mapper to know which access=* tags to
use. At the moment, I think it's more confusing than it needs to be.