I have been doing some looking around for on road bike lanes and trying to figure out what the standard is for some situations. Since where I live there are varying types of signage and/or pavement markings and wanted to figure out what the appropriate label for each scenario. Wanted to get things right before additions to the cycle network in my hometown are done soon.
Some of the scenarios are very easy to solve since one road has a dedicated cycle lane on each side so its clearly cycleway=lane
One road has a sharrow pattern along the shoulder and “share the road” signs along the stretch of road. This would indicate to me cycleway=shared
Two scenarios I see present are not something i’ve been able to find clear determination. They are roads that have only the “share the road” signs with no road markings and roads with a green “bike route” sign along them. The question I have is would they also be cycleway=shared or is some other designation appropriate?
Also with these different routes, they are designed as part of a community bike system plan, so would all of these types of routes also have the “lcn” designation?
Its the United States. The town i’m referring to is Washington, MO where I live and have been doing a lot of editing. I wanted to figure this out since there is some additions to the route network soon. There is a mix of different cycling type routes in the town so i wanted to note the extent of it now. you can see a bit of what I have done so far there now and not sure what is the right designations due to signage and marking differences.
For lcn. There is one route that is a designated named route as part of the existing network (combined separate cycleway and street routings). I figure the idea is use relation tagging for that? And other streets that are part of a network but not a particular route would use lcn instead?
For cases like this i mapped streets with the following tags:
cycleway=shared_lane
highway=residential
lanes=1 (the same lane shared by car and bycicles)
maxspeed=30 (the speed is clearly tagged in horizontal and vertical signs)
oneway:bicycle=yes (in this case bycicle and motorcar traffic flow in the same direction)
oneway=yes
muralito: I would say that your case fell under cycling friendly streets, in the article you quoted, not cycleways.
If you do use cycleway=shared_lane in this case, how do you distinguish this from advisory cycle lanes? In the UK you can have three situations where there is no physical barrier between where cycling and motor vehicles are allowed:
Mandatory cycle lane, delimited from the motor vehicle part by a solid white line; motor vehicles must not use or park in these;
Advisory cycle lane, delimited by a broken white line; unfortunately vehicles usually do park in these, unless there is also a double yellow, no parking, marking by the kerb;
Designated cycle rjoads; normal roads with bicycle symbols painted on the carriageway.
I would say only the first two were cycleways, the second being shared The third is just a cycling friendly road, in terms of the wiki article.
(Roads in the UK designated for cycle use are often too narrow to have actual cycle lanes. One part of the London cycle network, near me, is in reality a single track road with passing places, because it has cars, vans, and the occasional small lorry, parked on both sides, leaving only the centre free for traffic, except by gaps in the parked cars…)
In cases 1) and 2) i would not use cycleway=shared_lane, since the road has lanes for each use.
In that case i would map using one the cases in the wiki referenced “L” or “M”.
Seems the issue and this pops up in other areas, is that there are different markings and terminology used to describe infrastructure. The way it looks on the ground here in the example I have been having most issue with, the ones with green “bike route” signs but no markings on street. (is part of a designated bikeway by the city) is to call it shared lane since what occurs is the sharing of traffic lanes with the cars on the road with traffic volumes and road widths being such that there is no conflicts that could arise. From what I can tell there is no lane markings on the road due to combination of the roads have no lane markings overall being residential streets and that the route predates the use of sharrows. (though talking to a Parks & Rec person they are doing an audit of route signage to see what needs to be replaced due to age or missing signs, so maybe those will be added)
Looking more carefully at the shared_lane description, it seems to me that almost every road in the UK, that is not a motorway and does not have an explicit cycle lane, would need to be tagged as shared_lane. That doesn’t make sense. (Even with mandatory cycle lanes, it is only mandatory that motor vehicles keep out, not that cycles keep in, so even then, the motor vehicle part is shared with cyclists,.) I thought there was a general rule that one didn’t clutter the map by explicitly mapping the default case.
Where you do get a shared_lane situation in the UK is that most bus lanes are also shared with cycles and taxis.
Simple cycle icons on the road just mean that the road has been designated as a preferred road for medium to long distance cyclists, and are usually part of an official cycling route, although, unfortunately, many of these have so much traffic that cyclists seem to prefer to use the sidewalk, illegally.
That was the way i was thinking if you take the term shared lane literally. Since technically all roads with no explicit cycle lane would be shared with the exception of roads that explicitly prohibit bikes. I’ve applied the designation to roads that have either a bike route signage on it, share the road signs, or markings on the road as a way of clarifying designated and preferred routes. Though this brings up the point if a better term than shared lane should be used for these cases. but for rendering purposes you would want some difference from a normal road so people know what are the roads with some level of signage/markings since they are often at least somewhat more accomodating to cyclists than average road.