I know NE2 has been banned for a long time & and I also know he went deep into a lot of rabbit holes, but there are some edits I’ve seen of his that say rcn=proposed. I know that a lot has changed since he was banned, but my question is…what to do with these particular tags? I was informed they’re for bike lanes and bike routes, or something to do with bicycles, but that’s about all I know (outside of my wheelhouse). In looking at some of the roads I find this tag on, I’ll see cycleway=* which tells me someone went through and cleaned up some of the bike lane stuff, however left the rcn=* tag there. If there’s a cycleway or cycle lane, is it ok to remove the rcn=* tag?
rcn=proposed is a longstanding tag for indicating that the roadway is part of a proposed state bike route. The idea is to pair it with rcn_ref=* for the route number or rcn_name=* for the route name, then change rcn=proposed to rcn=yes once the route is approved. But for many years now, the preferred approach for modeling a bike route has been a route relation with network=rcn, which would also have state=proposed if it’s still in a proposal process. As you’d expect for a tag that’s all about something ephemeral and uncertain, rcn=proposed enjoys less software support than rcn=yes, but OpenCycleMap and CyclOSM probably still understand it. I hope no router actually uses the tag, because it often appears on railway=abandoned to signify a rails-to-trails conversion that hasn’t happened yet.
If NE2 were still around, I’d expect him to have no qualms about deleting the rcn=proposed tags as a mere redundancy. After all, he was instrumental in promoting the use of route relations for bike routes, coining or popularizing several common secondary keys like cycle_network=* and mapping a great number of the original bike route relations in the U.S. For example, most of the rcn=proposed occurrences in Florida stem from this changeset, which added the same ways to a series of route relations, some of which are still tagged state=proposed.
To be safe, before deleting the tag from a roadway or bikeway, make sure the way is part of a bike route relation. The route may have since been approved or relocated away from the roadway, so you may have to do a little bit of detective work. Even if you can no longer find any trace of the proposed route in relation form, a rcn=proposed these days would be next to meaningless without an accompanying rcn_ref=* or rcn_name=* or changeset source=*.
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