Since I’ve lived in my city, I’ve had doubts about how I should map wide sidewalks which have painted segregated bicycle paths on them (terrible infrastructure btw, but that’s not the point of this post). (Panoramax link, OSM link)
The wiki advises different methods depending on the language : the english one (schematic S3) prefers highway=path, the french one (schematic N3) prefers highway=footway. I tend to agree with the latter : physically speaking, the infrastructure is and always was definitely a sidewalk, just with bicycle paths painted on it. It is radically different to a countryside path (or a “Voie Verte” as we call them in France). Trouble is : my method isn’t taken into account by routers like BRouter (or not prioritised enough), which means routers prefer to use the primary road parallel to the sidewalk, which is way more dangerous.
What are your opinions on the french method ? Do you agree, or should I use the highway=path method instead ? Thanks in advance for your answers.
My opinion is that in this case the router should be fixed following:
The good thing about brouter is that you can relative easily change a profile to match your preferences. Have a look at trekking.brf and search for bicycle_road the profile around that.
The brouter web interface detailed route data table enables you to debug routing decisions, copy the “spreadsheet” for the wrong route, force the route via a via point to the correct route and compare those “spreadsheets” to see which weights are causing the behavior.
Once you found a good way to give these sidewalk:[left/right/both]:bicycle=yes ways the right penalty it would be good to create a pull request for brouter so others can benefit from it also.
Please don’t interpret the tags highway=path/footway/cycleway to mean very specific designs. They are pretty broad tags and none of them are generally used for just urban paths or just rural paths. You can always add more tags like footway=sidewalk to indicate that it’s a sidewalk, but that does not mean it is necessarily urban.
I’m not aware of any tagging scheme that would indicate that paths have a lot of pedestrian–cyclist conflicts.
As to the example you provided, the most important thing is that the access tags and segregated tag are set correctly, which they are. That said, highway=footway with a bicycle tag might be the least-supported method to map a cycle & foot path. Interestingly, iD (at least in France) and Carto don’t support it, for example. iD has regionally different tags for its “Cycle & Foot Path” features.
Me too, and I think @supsup’s point was spot on as well!
While this is true, the Panoramax link clearly shows a segregation line and a bicycle symbol painted explicitly on the paved surface of the road (and thus, probably, also a bicycle traffic sign somewhere along it, perhaps at an intersection). I think these would warrant a highway=cycleway instead of a =path. But as you point out…
… this is true too (and in Finland, iD would suggest =cycleway).
The primary road isn’t actually really parallel to the sidewalk/cycleway, it is a bit away which means the primary road doesn’t have any sidewalks or cycleways alongside it
It’s been a while, over 3 months I’d say so everything got updated accordingly since then.
The primary road isn’t actually really parallel to the sidewalk/cycleway, it is a bit away which means the primary road doesn’t have any sidewalks or cycleways alongside it
It’s been a while, over 3 months I’d say so everything got updated accordingly since then.
Indeed there is a visible separation (which obviously deserves the segregated=yes tag) ; however it isn’t a physical separation at all, the whole sidewalk is at the same level without kerbs. That is why I have doubts about applying the cycleway tag.
Pretty much. I’m not saying this situation is ideal, but the choice between the tags highway=path/footway/cycleway depends mostly on regional and personal habit. That’s why verifiable extra tags like surface are so important.
I think essentially it comes down to the fact that OSM after so many years is unable to explicitly represent a multi-use, car-free road.
Several conventions have been created to represent what isn’t otherwise representable, so they all require editors and consumers to agree (more of less) on what it means.
Neither convention is really trying to capture specific traits of the physical infrastructure.
I think it’s more important to stick with the community consensus than to figure out if you personally agree or disagree with that consensus. If you tag differently from the consensus, chances are higher that your tagging will not be read correctly.
If I follow your way of thinking, what should be done about the fact that local (in this case, the French) wikis differ from the English (“global”) wiki ?
The Norwegian wiki also differs from the English wiki. We tag according to the community consensus, as documented on the wiki. Anyone consuming data “in” Norway would need to interpret the data accordingly.
Why the assumption that anything needs to be done?
Sometimes the exact usage of tags differs between local communities. Sometimes these differences are the result of actual differences is how things are defined in those areas.
For instance, shared-use sidewalk bike/pedestrian paths are tagged as highway=cycleway in the UK, because they are specifically designated in legislation as cycleways, not footways. I have no idea what the legislation is in France, but maybe they define things differently over there.
It is more complicated in France, because it depends on the signs that are used. In my city, within the 1.5km of this segregated sidewalk, the use of trafic signs for the infrastructure is pretty chaotic :
sometimes there are signs that indicate a simple cycleway ;
in others place there are signs that indicate a segregated foot/bicycle path (which doesn’t even exist in french legislation, pure extra-legal invention from the city) ;
in most places, there is no sign at all, which would technically mean one can’t cycle on the sidewalk even though there are road markings.
That’s the reason why I rely on the ground infrastructure : signs don’t help me to figure out which tags are appropriate.
There is significant variation in how that is mapped in different regions, some places would use ,
highway=footway (because it can be seen as primarily pedestrian infrastructure) , other regions use,
highway=cycleway (because you can cycle on it), and other regions use
highway=path (because it’s both modes equally)
So I don’t think there is a correct answer, given what is in use all should be viewed as equivalent when bicycle=designated + foot=designated are present.
In our regional tagging guidelines for Australia we have this documented as
# by convention we mark shared paths as highway=cycleway,
# but equally highway=footway could be used, because it's
# neither a cycleway or a footway, it's a shared path.
# Based on how I tag there's no distinction between
# highway=footway and highway=cycleway where we have
# foot=designated + bicycle=designated.
highway=cycleway
# like footway=sidewalk, but because the highway tag is cycleway,
cycleway=sidewalk
# because both foot and bicycle are marked
foot=designated
bicycle=designated
# both modes share the same space
segregated=no
surface=concrete
