The idea came about to be by this mechanical edit (which has already been reverted) and my plan to deprecate busway for bus lanes. Basically, some mappers use busway=designated which to me is a nonsense value because they key mostly exist to denote the existence of bus lanes (which some ways with busway=designated do but not exclusively) whereas the value is an access tag (which is almost universally this).
From the sample, I’ve gathered the following uses:
- Denoting bus infrastructure, making it a synonym to
bus=designated - Denoting bus-only road, some of which are supposed to be
highway=busway(most notably the UoM Transitway which actually was changed fromhighway=buswaytobusway=designatedfor routers sake). - Denoting bus lanes (synonymous with
busway=lane). This is mostly a Leeds-only problem since almost all of them came from a single user (more specifically, it also includes more creative uses of this tag such as subkeys, mixing in conditions without:conditionaland even what’s supposed to be per-lane access).
In fact, busway isn’t the only offender since cycleway=designated also has been used a couple times (though the biggest combination of cycleway with designated is with access subkeys like cycleway:right:bicycle=designated which is a valid documented value but still, there are over 500 values on cycleway where that tag is used a kind of access tag).