[OSM-talk] Bike / Pedestrian directions on the MQ Open sites

[Steve Bennett]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 1:04 AM, Antony Pegg <antthelimey at gmail.com> wrote:
> knowing the amazing diligence of this community, I'm sure you guys will find
> tags we've missed that should or could be used for bike/pedestrian.  If you
> feel its worth mentioning, please please please provide some point of
> reference so we can eyeball it - a wayID, or a link to a route on the open
> mapquest site where it isnt going thru a feature you think it should.

Welcome to the lion's den. :) The whole bike/pedestrian path thing is
quite complicated, mostly because the rules are different in different
countries, and many people (myself included) have difficulty
understanding that the assumptions they make in their own country
don't hold up elsewhere.

The most useful info is here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_tags_for_routing/Access-Restrictions

The point being that "highway=cycleway" is ok for pedestrians in some
countries (notably, Australia) and not in others (notably, Germany).
Similarly highway=footway is ok for bicycles in some countries and not
in others.

Some useful links:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Access
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:path

Anyway, just did a quick test:
http://open.mapquest.com/embed?hk=4-QgRUXMaY

I'm shocked. That's almost the exact route I took yesterday. With
cloudmade, I had to add 3 waypoints. Obviously Mapquest rates bike
paths a lot more highly than Cloudmade does (which is good!). Looks
like we're going to be good friends.

Steve