Single-side cycle lanes

I like A/B-Street. It gives a refreshingly clear view of mapped traffic infrastructure. When importing my city, I get to see two-way cycle-lanes on one-way streets, where there is a cycleway:left:lane mapped.

Looking at the Wiki, Tag:cycleway=lane - OpenStreetMap Wiki - it is says nothing about (bi-) directionality of such cycle lanes, it even advises an out of fashion tag (…opposite…).

From the perspective of a local, of course such lanes are one-way for cyclists, contra flow of motorized traffic.

Before I bug dabreegster about this: Is this different in other jurisdictions? Does the wiki need more love?

Data consumers should assume that a cycleway:<direction>=lane is oneway in the direction of the traffic flow on that side unless stated explicitly otherwise (cycleway:<direction>:oneway=no).

Is this not in the wiki? It’s kind of self-evident, otherwise, looking at taginfo, over 90% of all cycle lanes mapped were bi-directional. But anyway, yes, the wiki always needs more love.

Looks like this forum is going slow, no answers e.g. from MUTCD aligned users, so i ventured to create Cycleway lanes on oneway streets · Issue #904 · a-b-street/abstreet · GitHub - please excuse my English :slight_smile:

hello, what is “A/B-Street” and what is “MUTCD”?

Hello Xandrex,

MUTCD is a code/law governing the posting of signs and road markings used in the USA. Several other nations in the world heed to its advices. In many ways, its rules are orthogonal to the rules in e.g. the jurisdiction where I map, which is governed by the UN Convention on Road Signs and Signals.

A/B-Street is an application, that simulates traffic in local areas and it gets the base data from the openstreetmap database (kind of an oxymoron, this expression), which can be modified in the domain of the application only, to look how changes in on-site features affect usage of on-site traffic infrastructure. In other words, it is a so-called consumer of the data, that you and I contribute to OSM. BTW it also contains routers, that make use of OSM in advanced ways, to create realistic scenarios.

The information about directionality and contraflow lanes can be found on the Bicycle page, though perhaps it should be added to other pages too.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle

Typically you use cycleway:<side>:oneway=-1 for contraflow (ref M3a and M3b) and no for bidirectional (ref L1b and M2d).

Edit: also see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:cycleway:right:oneway

2 Likes