Mapping combined ways for cycling and walking

[Peter_Elderson]

@Minh_Nguyen

@Peter_Elderson

yes: you are allowed to cycle there, no matter what type of highway this road is. Suitability for regular bicycles is not certain.

designated: this path is legally and practically meant for cycling. You may expect it is suitable for cycling on regular bicycles.

In other words, a bicycle routing profile should ignore the bicycle=yes tag when deciding whether to route along a given way. As you’re probably aware, precious few routers have ever interpreted bicycle=yes in this manner.

It sounds like you’d tag my county’s expressways as bicycle=yes. I could get behind that, but for different reasons than what you’ve described:

Huh? I don’t see how you can read this in my text?

Bicycle routing should always honour the bicycle=yes tag. Because it means that you are allowed to cycle there.

If your country’s expressways allow cycling and are tagged as an OSM-type that allows cycling, there is no need to tag bicycle access as yes, because it is already implicit/default.
If the expressway does not allow cycling, and is tagged as an OSM-type that does not allow cycling, again there is no need to tag bicycle access as no.

If the expressway does allow cycling, but it is tagged as an OSM-type that does not, bicycle=yes indicates the situation and routers can route this road.

If the expressway does not allow cycling, but is tagged as an OSM-type that does, bicycle=no indicates the situation and routers can route this road.

If the expressway has an accompanying side path especially for cycling, then that path is a cycleway, and bicycle=designated is implicit.

What did I miss?