I am fixing a painted bus lane in my area that was mapped as a service road. Most of the bus lane is two painted lanes on the left on each side of the road with a barrier so I mapped it with busway:left = lane on each of the ways.
The bus lane at one point merges into a single lane that is used in both directions. Should I merge the ways into a single way with the tag busway = lane and restrict left turns. Or is a better method to keep the ways separate and tag only one side with busway:left = lane?
I’m not one hundred percent sure which point you refer to. Do you mean this way? The link you’ve shared just shows a large portion of the map making it not all that clear to what you want to point. It often helps to share a specific node/way (like my link). You can find out which way corresponds to a certain feature by using the “Query features”-button.
If the road I linked to is the segment you mean, then I think it you can leave the dual carriageway as is (modelled as two parallel one-ways), because the dual-carriageway only merges very briefly before splitting up again. This is also written in this wiki-page. The busway is quite annoying though. The way I would approach it would be to just add busway:left=lane to both roads (just like on all other road segments) because this busway kind of belongs to both the northern as well as the southern road.
Additionally I have the impression that the bi-directional portion of the busway is wider than the unidirectional parts, meaning that it is just two bus lanes stuck together.
Your proposal of adding busway:left on only one way also seems to be a viable alternative. If you do this, it seems best to add busway:left=lane to the southern road (because when looking at the aerial imagery, the bi-directional part seems much more a continuation of the southern than the northern busway) and add a tag oneway:bus=no this this road to state that buses are allowed in both directions. (I would also add busway:oneway=no to explicitly state that the busway allows busses in both directions, this tag has however not seen significant usage).
If you’d like the extra detail, you are of course welcome to merge the road. Mapbox has some general guidelines and nice images to illustrate how this junction would look if you merged the ways after the intersection. You would indeed just add busway=lane to this part of the road.
I hope this is remotely helpful to you. Kind regards
Would you mind looking at this way Way: ‪Central Avenue Northwest‬ (‪104449681‬) | OpenStreetMap . It significantly longer than the way you linked. In this situation should it be made into a single way or left as two ways? It is somewhat confusing because it has a turn lane combine with the bus lane then split off again.
Sorry for not clarifying the way in my initial post.
The segment you linked has no physical separation for about 1.4 km so I would most definitely merge them into a single way.
If you really want to map detail, you might want to use the "bus:lanes=" and "lanes:bus="schemes (there are three schemes currently in use to map bus lanes ). Using this scheme, you can explicitly map which lane is the bus lane.
I’m obliged to add I don’t usually map American infrastructure, so it might be wise to wait a little to hear the opinion of someone with experience regarding these double carriageways.
