San José, California, recently put up scores of cyclist-oriented guide signs all around town. San José may be thinking of following San Francisco’s lead by replacing its erstwhile bike route program with something more useful. (Signs for Route 11 remain as of writing, but there never were any other routes.)
Whereas the national standard calls for such signs to give the distance to the destination in miles, San José’s signs express the distance in minutes. I’ve tagged these durations as destination:duration=* on dedicated cycleways and destination:bicycle:duration=* on the traffic sign nodes. I also clarified the destinations with destination:wikidata=* tags, so that a very sophisticated data consumer could maybe use it to influence travel time estimates.
So far, so good, but now the city transportation department has gone a step further, putting up pedestrian wayfinding signs that encourage visitors to get out of the car and off the bike and explore the downtown area on foot. These are real traffic signs, analogous to the guide signs for cyclists, but they carry a more action-oriented message similar to some wayfinding systems at airports and shopping malls.
I could tag the nearby sidewalks with destination=* and destination:duration=*, but guidance instructions like “Continue straight to Attend a City Council Meeting” and “Turn left to Dance the Night Away in the Qmunity District” would be too cute if that’s not at all what you intended to do.
Has anyone come across signs like these before? What would you call them? What would be an intuitive tagging scheme for the signs and the affected sidewalks?
Do you one better… Signs appearing with both minutes to target and distance to the 100 meters exact such as one saying at town boundary where the signing system starts it is 3.7km to the railstation and 12 minutes which assumes a speed of about 20kmh i suppose.
Collected a bunch of picturea last summer seeking out those signed/marked routes of where the signs were, then the website/pages went down, so project parked half way, tagging the cycle route refs of what was discovered on the ground.
“Rete ciclabile Ciclopolitana · 30 km di piste · 4 quadranti geografici di quattro diversi colori: Blu per il quadrante nord-est, Arancione per il quadrante nord …”
At the… (ellipsis) It ends, that what the search engine scraped before getting a forbid to crawl. Found painted signs on cycleways with Cn and Gn codes but there’s a bunch missing inbetween C1 and C9 e.g. So suspect going by the link title the big reveal might come in 2027, paid by our tax money of course.
Those would be destination:symbol=*, but I think these messages are a bit of a stretch to call symbols. They’re always textual and suggest an action in relation to the venue.
