Best practice with bike lanes is to have a unique colour that distinguishes them from the road. In Australia (and the US?) this tends to be green, but I’ve seen red ones in Europe as well. It’s meaningful to tag this information, because it indicates higher quality, more visible cycle infrastructure.
However, there doesn’t seem to be a tagging standard for this. I’ve scoured Key:cycleway - OpenStreetMap Wiki, and the only relevant detail I’ve found is that you can in theory do something like cycleway:both:surface:colour=green. However, I don’t think this is sufficient because:
The actual colour is inconsequential, what matters is whether the lane is “bicycle coloured”, and
This isn’t a documented standard anywhere
So I’m wondering if it would be reasonable to propose a tag such as cycleway:*:cycle_colour=yes. I’ve never proposed a tag before, so I’d love some advice before I do about:
Is this likely to be approved, and
How can I align this to other standards in terms of naming, value etc?
The color would be useful to detailed renderers, which need to depict the lane in more or less the same color that appears in real life. In theory, it could know that a bike lane in Australia or the U.S. can only be painted green. However, not every country has standardized the color, and requiring renderers to figure out national defaults might hamper uptake of any micromapping-related tag.
Yes exactly, so I have no issue with cycleway:both:surface:colour=green, which gives the precise colour, coexisting with cycleway:both:cycle_colour=true or whatever it is. But I think it’s important that they are separate.
Because it can be coloured without having the bike lane colour. Here are two weird examples in Melbourne (where I’m focused on mapping) where the lanes show green (bike colour), blank, and also an additional colour which is neither:
In this case, red is the bus lane colour, but a bus lane can also be a bike lane. Yellow is some sort of protected crossing colour, but it can also be a bike lane and a road!
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me, but yes. That’s another advantage of my proposal. However you can’t assume that all bike lanes are that colour by default, because only a minority of bike lanes have the colour in Melbourne.
No, I mean the individual ways should just be tagged with *:surface:colour=* and not also with a tag that indicates whether the colour is somehow official. The colour value can be used to infer that.
I have a similar problem where I am trying to highlight the different types of cycle lanes and how they interact with the traffic and what level of hazard they are. There are cycle lanes that traffic may enter - dashed lines, then there are cycle lanes that traffic should not enter - solid white lines, then there are cycle lanes with bollards that traffic cannot enter and then we have the cycle paths which are a lower hazard but they can be shared cycle paths with pedestrians or separate cycle paths. Can I have different colours for all these different hazard levels? I really would love a solution to this.
To give my two cents, I’ve seen bike lanes painted green… and I’m in Germany where the standard is to use red surfaces (though it also isn’t entirely universal, Frankfurt a.M. — where I’ve seen this bzw. — used red pavers for pedestrians and grey ones for cyclists when the latter isn’t asphalted IIRC). It also was only used in a crossing but still, this is a thing which warrants me to prefer cycleway:*:surface:colour over cycleway:*:cycle_colour alone.
Considering that both, adding suffixes to cycleway and that surface:colour is another established tag (particularly with cycleway:*:surface already in the list) are cleary defined, it’s IMO fine to add another example for a cycleway subtag.