Coloured bike lanes (proposal?)

General talk Tagging general discussion
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21

Instead of adding yet another tag for only cycle lanes with all its problems in case of multiple lanes with different colors, would it not be a better approach to stick to a more general system by using the :lanes tagging?

Example (from left to right: two lanes without restriction, a shared, green lane for bus and bicycle, another lane without restriction, a red cycle lane)

lanes=4
oneway=yes
access:lanes=||no||no
bicycle:lanes=||yes||designated
bus:lanes=||designated||no
cycleway:lanes=no|no|share_busway|no|lane
surface:colour:lanes=||green||red

Edit: Add a description for the lanes and count the bus lane as lanes=*

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22

Not a bad idea, although it will make querying very challenging because you would have to work out which position is the bike lane and then cross reference the surface:color:lanes.

23

Cycle lanes are not included in lanes=*, so that wouldn’t work.

24

You are right that cycle lanes do not count to lanes=* but they are included in *:lanes[:*]. Please take another look at my example above. I just add some more words to it to make it clearer.

25

The challenge is not that tough. Take a look at cycleway:lanes=* and use the corresponding values of surface:colour:lanes=*.
If we follow the approach with cycleway:surface:colour we have a solution for cycle lanes but we do not know the position of the lane and we run into problems if there are several cycle lanes with different colors plus we would need more tags for the color of bus lanes or any other lane.

26

I sometimes think there’s a mystical belief that adding more colons makes the tagging more precise somehow. :blush:

cycleway:colour should be enough. Obviously it’s the surface. What else is it going to be? The bikes? Their water bottles?

As discussed elsewhere, cycleway is fine on its own. You can specify :both if you like but it’s not compulsory.

Ideally we should try and keep OSM tagging as close to human-readable as possible without adding layers of extra verbosity.

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27

The air above it! :rofl:

Which is going to make for some interesting effects at intersections when the green, blue, red & yellow lanes all cross each other! :grinning:

2 Likes
28

Well, it could be be a delineation color (e.g. white or yellow line or area separating cycling lane from other lanes). While that outline color is also technically part of the “surface”, in OSM we usually mean for the surface tag to describe the biggest/main/fill area only.

But whatever, really, we are starting to venture into paving_stones details-alike madness nanomapping territory here :smiley_cat:

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29

Wait, I already updated the wiki to recommend cycleway:*:surface:colour. Should I change it to cycleway:colour?

30

I agree in principle, though the crossing:markings=* scheme already recommends surface:colour=* and crossing:markings:colour=* for something similar.

31

In case it’s helpful background information:

In North America, the National Association of City Transportation Officials recommends green be used for coloured bike facilities. They have examples where it’s just the bike box and others where it’s the full lane. These are just design guidelines though, not a local/regional law.

In Toronto, Canada, most bike lanes where the area is painted this way are green, though the exception is with priority bus lanes, which are painted red but signed for cyclist use as well.

32

As of last December, green-colored pavement is now specified by the national MUTCD in the U.S. Until then, 162 state and local transportation departments had obtained waivers from the Federal Highway Administration to implement the NACTO guideline on an interim basis. No other color can be applied to bike lanes. Similar regulations exist in Canada, for example in the Ontario Traffic Manual, but the red for transit lanes apparently takes precedence.

33

No, your change was fine. surface:colour is documented and widely used to “describe the colour of the surface of an object”, so if you want to specify the surface color of a bike lane mapped to the centerline, this results in cycleway:*:surface:colour. I’m a bit confused that there’s such a long discussion about this.

In my opinion, surface:colour:lanes is only necessary if there are two or more bike lanes in the same direction with different colors, i.e. a bike lane between car lanes with a different color. All other cases are described in sufficient detail with cycleway:*:surface:colour imho.

(btw. Straßenraumkarte from Berlin is a showcase how surface colours of cycle lanes can be used.)

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34

Thanks for pointing me to the Ontario Traffic Manual, I hadn’t run into it before!