Cycleway - lane on left / shared on right

Hi,

Many of the roads in my local council area a too narrow to accommodate a cycle lane on both sides of the road. So the local council has adopted a policy of having a painted lane on one side of the road (the uphill side) and shared on the downhill side (i.e. a bike symbol painted on the car lane and/or signage). I’ve read the following wiki pages http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:cycleway and http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle#cite_note-anyroad-1 but this specific case isn’t mentioned, is this valid?

cycleway:left=lane
cycleway:right=shared

And is there a tagging for a 1-way or 2-way cycleway on the footpath, these appear to mostly be mapped as a separate way?

Regards
Dave

Yes, it is valid.

I’m not completly sure what you mean by this. Could you explain the situation in more detail?

Thanks.

There are several segments of cycleway in Sydney where the footpath is designated as the cycleway rather than the roadway. Should they just be mapped as separate parallel ways, or is there a cycleway:left=footpath tag?

Also is there a recommended way of tagging a highway=trunk which is a popular cycle route, there’s a large shoulder so it’s very safe but routing tools like MapSource using OSM maps go out of there way to avoid it. Some mappers have added sections with cycleway=lane which I’ve extended to cover the missing sections, and I’ve added bicycle=yes as I believe highway=trunk implies bicycle=no?

I’m not completly sure about this (no such ways in my main-area), but I think they would usually be tagged as cycleway=track. Apparently a tag/value to tell if it’s segregated from the footway and if you have to use it is still missing…

I have no idea how to tag that. cycleway=lane feels somehow wrong to me (in germany cycleway=lane would mean somehting you have to use, but as you described it it would be voluntary (so cyclists may also use the road)). If there is no such obligation in your country cycleway=lane seems ok. Maybe you better ask this on a mailing list since there are very few people reading the international sections of this forum.

At least in germany highway=trunk does not imply bicycle=no (those roads qould have a special sign and are not neccesary trunk, they get motorroad=yes), but not everyone knows this (so routers and mappers might do this wrong and people might complain that they got an “illegal” route) and on most trunk roads it’s likely very uncomfortable for most people (at least in DE with our “very kind” car-drivers :wink: ). But these implications differ depending on the country, so have a look at the Wiki-Page about them.

Yes it doesn’t seem correct to me either, there is in fact a requirement in NSW “When a bicycle lane is marked on the road, cyclists must use it.”. In this case it’s not marked, nor technically is it a bike lane since this isn’t a local government designated cycleway, but it is a well used route so ideally there would be some way of tagging to guide routers that it’s actually a safe route.

This road has a high speed limit (70-80kph in most sections), but the shoulder is at least 2.5m wide with lanes crossing the odd slip road so it’s comfortable to cycle 2 abreast at any time. Many other similarly tagged roads would be very uncomfortable to ride though, it’s really down to the width and condition of the shoulder. Major roads in Sydney either have no shoulder (and worse a footpath with curb and channeling), a narrow shoulder which can be ridden single file, or a wider shoulder. Problem is routers i.e. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenTripPlanner use the same high weight to all highway=trunk which means instead of routing 100m down the road it’ll make you turn right across 2-3 lanes and do a 700m detour down back streets. Using cycleway=lane prevents this but it’s a work around to the issue of specifying different router weights to different roads all tagged as highway=trunk but having different shoulder widths or other attributes conducive to safe cycling (like drivers=passive/aggressive/insane…)

You can tag the shoulder, see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shoulder
So you could tag shoulder=yes, shoulder:access:bicycle=yes, should:width=2.5

Thanks I’ll give that a go, not really sure though if it’ll make any difference to the routing but I do think it makes more sense to use attributes like number of lanes, shoulder etc. that a simple weight based on the type of road.