This is mostly concerning perths Safe Active Street Program, please read about it via the link provided because I want to keep this short :P
Currently most are tagged with (at minimum): highway=living_street maxspeed=30 bicycle=yes
I have a couple of questions/suggestions for how these should be tagged
Should bicycle=yes be replaced with bicycle=designated? The streets have painted sharrows and other stuff indicating its designed for cyclists as well
Should these roads be tagged as cyclestreet=yes or bicycle_road=yes?. Cyclists gain no special privileges on these roads, but drivers are made aware of their presence and the street is designed to make it safer and easier for them to travel, PTA documents also explicitly compare them to bike boulevards.
Ignoring the puffery of the program that the PTA gives on its website… some of these roads are rather rubbish as “safe active streets”, a minority of them often only amount to just a couple of speed tables at the streets intersections and little else, in those cases should the streets revert back to highway=residential? should they have living_street=yes? (I’d also removed cyclestreet/bicycle_road in this case as well)
I’ll note that as far as I’m aware WA gives no special legal classification to Safe Active Streets, they are treated as Access Roads within the mainroads WA hierarchy, therefore the designation=shared_zone is probably not applicable.
It’s my understanding that in Australia, highway=living_street is only used for shared zones, where motor vehicles are legally required to give way to pedestrians and cyclists. It doesn’t look like this is the case here. I’d keep these tagged as highway=residential
Id suggest that if these roads form part of a signed bike route then create a route relation for the route. Otherwise, you could add the tag lcn=yes to indicate its setup as part of the local cycling network
Many bike specific routers or map styles already treat 30 km/h roads as safer. The addition of sharrows alone doesn’t make it any safer, so I wouldn’t classify these roads as cyclestreet or bicycle_road.
Makes sense to use lcn=yes, they don’t form part of a signed network (usually)
Its not only sharrows, it depends on the street but many of the Safe Active Streets are narrowed and/or have other traffic calming measures put in place, like chicanes, kerb extensions, (rarely) modal filters at intersections, etc.
I suppose a good “baseline” would be?:
highway=residential maxspeed=30 bicycle=designated cycleway:both=shared_lane cycleway:both:lane pictogram lcn=yes cyclestreet=yes unless the traffic calming measures put in place are absolutely rubbish.
Looks mostly good to me. I’m not convinced on the cyclestreet tag but you’d be the best person to make that call as the local.
I’d suggest being conservative with the cyclestreet tag and only adding it cars are actively encouraged to drive behind/at the same speed as bikes and not overtake them like they would on any other road. There’s not many roads in Vic that I’d consider cyclestreets. But if you think the traffic calming does adequately encourage shared use of the road then cyclestreet should be fine too.
Yes if there’s road markings or signage, that implies it should be bicycle=designated.
To me a living_street has features that communicate to both motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists that the place is either shared or pedestrian/cyclist priority, rather than being motorist priority. So for me it’s more about the design and signage, rather than a strict legal status (which is best tagged as designation and the access modes.
A signposted shared zone is one implementation that may be considered a living_street, but being signposted as “shared zone” doesn’t always mean it’s living_street. Conversely you could have other types of shared space implementations or road design features that aren’t signposted as “shared zone” but that would still qualify as living_street due to the site design.
Safe Active Streets kind of sit in the middle of this to me, or, to be less charitable, they didn’t go far enough in actually making these streets “living streets”. Whilst some of these streets (I think) might reach that criteria (e.g. Elizabeth Street in Nedlands) others are frankly rubbish in their design, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that all they did was slap some blue paint on the ground with the text “SAFE ACTIVE STREET” and called it a day.
maxspeed=30 is already a rather high speed limit for living_streets, most examples I’ve seen from other countries have them at 15km/h or 20km/h at most. Data collected afterwards (mostly) shows that traffic volumes and traffic speed decreased, but IDK if this.
The Australian wiki gives this for living streets:
Used for roads built to give pedestrians priority and higher consideration over motor vehicles compared with normal roads. On these roads pedestrians would expect drivers to give way to them. Typical design features include:
use of a distinguishing surface such as paving stones,
may be elevated to the same level as the footpath with vehicles driving up a “driveway” to get onto the living street
low speed limits (often 10-20km/h)
pedestrian traffic is given higher priority over vehicles, through explicit signage such “Give way to pedestrians” and pedestrian/vehicle symbols given equal weighting on signage
For safe active streets they… might? fulfil (1) sometimes, a lot of them have red bitumen. They’ve never fulfilled (2), nor (3) as they’re all 30km/h.
(4) is another maybe? This is the “signposting” that SAS’s use when you enter them:
Essentially it kind of implies that cyclists and pedestrians may be more active on this road, but there is nothing really explicitly stating that pedestrians are given priority over cars.
Welp I just received a lecture at Curtin from someone who actually works at the DTMI and they explicitly called attention to the difference between “shared zones” and “Safe Active Streets”, and said that pedestrians are still sort of expected to stay on footpaths; that is, that the infrastructure upgrades for SAS’s are mainly for making the “wheeling and riding” part of “walk, wheel, ride” more comfortable, not the “walk” part. Given this I’m rather confident in not tagging them as living_street
