(This is a bit off topic, but FYI, especially the Dutch community tags sidewalk
s on highway=cycleway
if they do have sidewalks. According to taginfo, more than 25000 cycleways have sidewalks tagged.)
Yes, this is kind of deliberate in the sense that I documented the actual use of the tag. As mentioned, bicycle_road
is not only used in countries with a vehicle=no + bicycle=designated
default restriction (Germany + Estonia AFAIK), but all over the place, including in countries which have no official concept of bicycle roads at all in the law.
In particular, Austria for example has a default vehicle=destination + bicycle=designated
restriction and Luxembourg used to have it until December 2020. So is this now bicyle_road
or cyclestreet
according to the definition about default restrictions?
That’s what I am trying to get across in this thread: The documented use so far about implied restrictions, at least outside roundabout Germany, Netherlands, Belgium does not coincide with actual use.
Plus, looking at the legislation of each country, the exact restrictions differ somewhat anyway.
But sure, maybe it would make sense to add another sentence in the wiki to make clear that bicycle_road
has been initially intended to specifically describe the legal situation in Germany specifically. Well, or at least, that this is what the wiki page initially looked like. On the other hand, no wonder: The concept of bicycle roads did not exist in most other countries in 2010 yet, so what else should that wiki page describe when it was translated to English in 2013?
Then again, I pretty much already wrote this on the wiki page for bicycle_road
, in the bottom section that talks about the difference to cyclestreet
:
The reason why two tags for about the same concept exist is likely because this page was initially just describing the German Fahrradstraße when it was created in 2010. When Belgian mappers documented cyclestreet=yes for the Belgian Fietsstraat in 2018, they either did not find this tag in the wiki or discarded it as too specific to the German legislation:
It has been documented that cyclestreet=yes should be used in countries where other vehicles than bicycles are allowed on bicycle roads by default while bicycle_road=yes is used in countries where only bicycles are allowed by default.
However, the documentation has been out of line with the actual usage of the tags.
As of December 2022, the community in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg rather consistently uses cyclestreet=yes while bicycle_road=yes is used more overall. In most other countries, both tags are in use.
As the exact legal restrictions differ somewhat and may change in the different countries, trying to group them into two different tags is not a meaningful endeavor, as in no country, both the less restrictive and the more restrictive variants exist at the same time. Also, for example in Luxembourg, the law initially forbade general motor vehicle traffic on cycle streets. Only end of 2020, the law was watered down to be similar to the legislation in Belgium.
Hence, data consumers should treat cyclestreet=yes as synonymous to bicycle_road=yes and rather look at the actual access restrictions tagged, optionally fall back to the tags listed in the table above if nothing is set, for better accuracy.
(link)