Mapping cyclemajig that changes between lane, track and way very often

After ten years of trials, the road authorities decided a few years ago to properly introduce Danish style protected cycle lanes. They are separated from the other traffic lanes with a less than full-height kerb, and from the pavement with an ever lower, or even slanted, kerb.

The NO guidelines say to tag these as cycleway=track on the cariageway line, which is fine.

There is also a strong argument in favour of mapping them as separate lines, because road authorities have decided that these are unidirectional cycleways, and they are signposted as such.

At bus stops, the main construction guideline is to place the unidirectional cycleway behind the bus stop, with pedestrian crossing from the pavement to the platform.

This necessitates a separated line, both for geometry and for pedestrian crossings. These even-more-separated unidirectional cycleways are also created at junctions with regular cycleways to ease transitions.

This would all have been fine – if there are no floating bus stops, either method is fine, and if there are floating bus stops, the separate line is better (IMO).

The problem is that the road authorities decided to not do like the Danes and the Dutch have figured out at intersections – to create a traffic calming table that raises the traffic lanes to the height of the cycle track and pavement – but instead decided to lower the cycle track and make it a formal and legal cycle lane through the intersection – and then elevate the lane to a track after the intersection.

So now we have situatons where the cyclemajig is a lane, a track, and a fully separated cycleway with pedestrian crossings on different stretches of a segment that’s a few hundred meters long.

How would you map this?

If your gut instinct is to respond “just be pragmatic, do one of them and accept that it’s not perfect”, that’s obviously not what I’m looking for. :slight_smile:

This was discussed at Mapping dedicated cycleway on pavement temporarily merging into main road. My very strong preference is to keep a discrete geometry all the way through, and tag the junction section (where it’s a lane) as separation=no, for the reasons outlined in that thread.

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Yeah, I really found the separation=no interesting. I wonder what kind of havoc that will wreak amongst mappers who belong to the “pragmatic” group. :slight_smile:

Do you have a photo of them? Or link to place that has photo of them?

Here’s a “normal” section:

Here’s a ramp-down to a cycle lane:

On the left you can see the opposite side going around the floating bus stop:

This particular road isn’t on ortophoto yet, but you see similar traits in ortophotos here:

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Add a little snow and those minikerbs look like a super fun thing to accidentally discover while cycling.

I took a look at a similar location in Helsinki, which switches between lane on a carriageway and separately tagged cycleway. This situation is slightly different, the cycleway in Helsinki turns into a lane for entire city blocks, and is a separated cycleway/footway the rest of the time.

But my main takeaway is that this kind of ”accurate” tagging makes a straight, curbless and extremely rideable route look like it’s full of slow, weird turns. And that’s on renderers that actually manage to create a coherent way of this. CyclOSM renders a bunch of ugly gaps and overlapping lines.

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I guess some renderers do a better job than others… :slight_smile: (this is the road that the photos were taken).