[OSM-talk] Tagging for street danger levels

Richard Mann richard.mann.westoxford at googlemail.com
Sun Jun 20 13:34:42 BST 2010


There's a school of thought that would like to see cycle maps produced
in this way (the people in Cheltenham call it the Cheltenham
standard), using a 5-point scale (roughly: dead-quiet, ok if you can
manage a straight line, need to be able to deal with a few cars, need
to be able to look over your shoulder, need to be able to go as fast
as the cars at junctions). Some of these are tagged as
cyclability=1|2|3|4|5, but I don't know anywhere that's done it on a
comprehensive basis using OSM. You could probably derive the values
from the traffic volume and the typical speed, if you want to do it
scientifically.

In Oxford, we tend to focus on levels 2 & 4 in that hierarchy, and
look for how you can get about the city if your skill level has
reached those two points. From that we've identified two networks for
getting about (the "main" and "quiet" networks). We've used
mcn=something for the main routes and lcn/lcn2=something for the quiet
routes.

As for rendering, you can either try to persuade Andy (the guy behing
opencyclemap) that he wants to include it (or probably better) render
it yourself. I've been getting quite a long way with Maperitive (which
is a fairly simple but not quite fully developed renderer for the
non-geek). Halcyon may also be available before too long.

You can see what we've done at
http://www.cyclox.org/oxford-journey-planner/cyclox-map/

Richard

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Toby Murray <toby.murray at gmail.com> wrote:
> Someone in my area is starting up a new website that is focused on
> cycling in the city. They have decided to use OSM as their map which
> is awesome. The question is: are there any tagging conventions to
> indicate how dangerous a particular stretch of road is to cyclists?
> They want to produce a map of the city that highlights the dangerous
> roads to avoid in order to show how they act as barriers and make it
> very difficult to move around town on a bicycle. I could also see a
> different map that highlights the safest roads and paths. It seems
> like this information would also be useful to routing services to be
> able to come up with bicycle specific routes that avoid the "certain
> death" roads.
>
> I see a "hazard=" tag but it doesn't seem to be used very much and is
> a little too general for what I had in mind. Perhaps hazard:cycle=
> with some kind of hazard level indication would work. I could see
> using numbers (0=safe path or bike lane, 1=residential/low traffic
> road, 2=bigger roads with higher speed traffic, 3=avoid at all costs)
> or some other string based identifier if that is deemed easier to
> understand. Some of this information could probably be implied by the
> highway= tag but that is a pretty incomplete picture. There are parts
> of the same road here in town that vary between different levels,
> usually getting far more dangerous when they hit a hill and start
> curving around. Also, there are several highways leading out of town
> that are similar to each other except for traffic flow which makes
> some of them absolutely wonderful to ride on while others are a death
> trap. I realize this can be somewhat subjective but I think there
> could be pretty good consensus among cyclists in a given area.
>
> Since I haven't found any tags on the subject I'm assuming there is no
> renderer support for such a concept either so I may end up trying to
> do some custom rendering which is another topic entirely... But I'm
> thinking if there is a consensus on this then support for it could be
> added to opencyclemap, hikebikemap, etc.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Toby
>
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