The most pragmatic solution here seems to be to remove the bicycle= tag, since the status is implied by local laws and bicycle= specifies legal restrictions.
Cycling in the UK legally kinda sucks but it’s not OSM’s fault.
EDIT: I note that the user is specifically going around adding bicycle=no to pavements, e.g. here, which I would consider unnecessary. Has anyone invited Pete Owens to this discussion?
Geniune question, I’m not trying to be funny here, but… what actually is the cycleway there?
Granted, I must defer to your local knowledge, since I’m just basing this question off a quick glance at Google Maps, but I couldn’t see any signage indicating that the pavement at that location (and for a substantial distance in either direction) is a shared-use cycleway. The pavement ways are tagged as bicycle=designated, so that legal designation and associated signage is what I’d expect that tagging to represent.
Is Google’s StreetView imagery just outdated, or what? The images I saw were dated 2024, but a search for the Weaver’s Way brought up a news article about the route’s creation in 2015, so if there were an actual cycleway there, I’d have expected some signage. The pavement also appears too narrow to be safely used as a shared-use way.
I couldn’t find anything documenting the route’s status as an actual formal cycle route either, other than the aforementioned news article, just some Facebook discussions. Is it an actual formal route maintained by some authority, or is it just a locally known thing that people just use that as a route?
if you subscribe to belief that bicycle=no means “you cannot even push or carry your bicycle here” (which is wrong, bicycle=no never ever meant that, despite some tagfiddling attempts to redefine it) you can change it to bicycle=dismount
retagging to bicycle=dismount is not wrong and I guess can be treated as being more specific
you can also contact app authors so that bicycle=no does not block dismounting
you can also write to local government about broken cycleway infrastructure so that cycle route gaps can be fixed
edit is correct, based on your description
Apart from the route as relation/9964419 which was added by @TomJeffs in 2019, there’s a web page and a brochure on a website which appears to be published jointly by the local borough and county councils. The link in the relation was broken (I’ve just fixed it), but there’s slightly more than just a news article and social media posts at Weavers Wheel Information | Blackburn with Darwen Connect
It’s also mentioned briefly in East Lancashire Strategic Cycle Network - Lancashire County Council with a link to a map (not licence compatible with OSM).
The route certainly exists. Whether there’s any infrastructure or shared use signage to make the route safe, convenient and legal to use is another question.
What would really help would be if a local cyclist with a camera could ride the Wheel and Spoke routes and upload photos to Mapillary/Panoramax.
Also not trying to be funny, but you could google “Weavers Wheel signage”? I just did. There’s plenty of it.
The Cycle streets journey planner will suggest dismounting for short sections of footpath if that turns out to be the fastest or quietest route to avoid a busy road.
bicycle=nostops this useful feature from working.
I wasn’t aware of this - good to know
Looking at some of the other edits Pete Owens made, they also tagged a dual carriageway as bicycle=yes, despite the fact that there’s a separately mapped cycle route running parallel to it. While it is in most places legal to cycle on a dual carriageway, I wouldn’t recommend it. This systematic tagging activity will do more harm than good if it ends up routing cyclists onto dangerous roads.
We should bear in mind that it’s reasonably normal to cycle on a dual carriageway. The tag is definitely unnecessary, but so far as I know it would never affect routing since there would be an implicit bicycle=yes tag when interpreting the way anyway.
I do think this user is being verbose, but I don’t think it’s really a problem.
(Yes, I am explicitly invoking Cunningham’s Law here. Feel free to correct me. Except for the cycling on dual carriageways bit, because I have cycled along enough at this point to know that 
)
It’s a 40mph dual carriageway, not a motorway. The cycle track might be suitable for pootling along at 15kph on a city bike, buy perhaps less so for 35kph on a road bike. There isn’t really suitable imagery to tell.
We also end up with redundant, but probably harmless, bicycle=yes tagging on highway=trunk roads thanks to a few broken routers. I’ve been guilty of that thanks to them being unable or unwilling to use other tags to differentiate between the characteristics of a 20mph single carriageway A road in central London from a 70mph dual carriageway elsewhere. I don’t think that better designed cycle routers will be swayed by a redundant access tag.
Related to this, I’ve just reverted a change to the public footpath wiki page which said to add ‘‘bicycle=no’’ to public footpaths as a default.
As discussed above, although this may be true in a lot of cases, I don’t believe this to be the correct default option. The public footpath designation tells us only about the rights inferred from this status, it doesn’t tell us about any other restrictions. It’s also not consistent with other PRoW tagging guidance we have.
I think your revert makes sense, although I can see where the changer was coming from. What the added change said was “In the United Kingdom … and should usually be accompanied by the following tags: bicycle=no; bicycle:pushing=no”. That’s the legal default in England and Wales, but (as said on numerous occasions above and elsewhere) access may often be permissive.
It would absolutely make sense to add a bicycle tag (of whatever value) if that was known, but personally I’d just omit it if it wasn’t. Also, I guess that some of Don’t map local legislation applies too.
It would also absolutely make sense for cycle routers to assume “you may not cycle on a public footpath” if they don’t know any better, but that’s an entirely different thing to “add these tags by default”!
Edit: I’ve changed the “In the United Kingdom …” sentence to acknowledge the existence of Scotland and Northern Ireland. In NI the most used designation tag for the equivalent of the E&W public_footpath there is also public_footpath. That doesn’t quite match the word in NI law, but whatever. In Scotland I suspect that all of the public_footpath should be something else, mostly core_path I guess (and of course default land access rights in Scotland are very different to the rest of the UK).
It no more makes sense to tag bicycle=no on a footpath than to put a “Trousers" label alongside your kids names on their school trousers.
It also makes the dataset brittle e.g. if the law changes.
They’ve edited again, and I’ve edited again, resulting in this net change.
Clearly @ftrebien would like people to explicitly tag public footpaths as bicycle=no + bicycle:pushing=no; I’m not convinced that it makes sense to encourage people to do that if they have never been somewhere and have never seen any signage. However I do agree that it makes sense to tag explicitly where the access situation is known, for example here cyclists on a public footpath near me are ask to dismount (not told to keep out altogether).
Or it could be the implicit default value, then only the exceptions would be mapped. But then, there’s the risk of never knowing if it’s already been surveyed or not.
I think the balance for public footpaths was appropriate before the recent changes. It allowed an assumption that there may be public footpaths on public highways, where surely (surely?) no-one is advocating we add bicycle=no to.
Just note that bicycle=no does not indicate if one may transit on foot while pushing a bicycle, it only restricts cycling. Whether one may or may not push a bicycle remains indeterminate. That’s why my edit also added bicycle:pushing=no, reflecting these posts in other threads:
That is your view, but people have previously said that they’ve used bicycle=dismount to mean “no cycling” and bicycle=dismount to mean “no access with a bicycle” (and then we even got into “but what if it is folded up and in a bag”…).
I don’t have a view what bicycle=no ought to mean, beyond “it’d be nice if everyone agreed what that was (but they don’t)”.
From what I’ve read on this subject the intent of the tagger could be anything from “no cycling" to “no wearing spandex".
This could be the key to avoiding this type of situation. Currently, all three routers on OSM’s website (GraphHopper, OSRM and Valhalla) interpret bicycle=no as a total ban on bicycles. You may be seeing a mapper tagging for (some highly visible) routers. As far as I understand, these routers should always have treated bicycle=no just like bicycle=dismount if restrictions on pushing are not specified with additional tags, but it’s been years that they treat them differently.
I don’t think people should be adding bicycle=no (or any other negative access tags) to routes just because those rights aren’t explicitly granted by virtue of the designation. I think people should be only add them if they’re reasonably certain that those restrictions do indeed apply, e.g. through local knowledge of the route or other circumstances they’re aware of.
While bicycle=no might be a sensible default for data users to apply to UK paths without a bicycle=* tag, I think there are too many edge cases for us to be adding that explicit tagging without other evidence. For example, there are a reasonable number of public footpaths that run along highways with more rights (which could be roads or other footways/cycle paths in towns). Also, most paths on Forestry Commission land will have permissive cycling and equestrian access, even if that’s not been explicitly tagged.
I’d expect any mass tagging of e.g. bicycle=no on PRoWs that’s not based on local knowledge to fall under the bulk editing guidelines, and require some form of discussion and consensus before being carried out.