I just reread the UN Convention on Road Traffic and I found a gem you might be interested in: In Chapter I Article I Litera c onwards, there is talk about “cycle lane” versus “cycle track”, Litera g(bis) and g(ter). I understand, that if the drafters had known openstreetmap in 1968, they would have introduced “pedestrian lane” vs. “pedestrian track” – of which only the latter you consider a sidewalk, if I am not mistaken. Educating mappers I leave up to you. I certainly will not argue against local common sense.
Yes, this is a decent analogy (common American English terms in parentheses):
Cyclists
Pedestrians
Cycle lane (bike lane)
Pedestrian lane
Cycle track (protected/separated bike lane, sidepath)
Pavement (sidewalk)
The delegates in Vienna were familiar with sidewalks.[1] See also article 20, which draws a distinction between the “carriageway” and the “pavement (sidewalk)”. Austria’s official translation renders the latter as Gehweg.
Although the United States was a key participant in the development of the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, it’s only a party to the older Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, which doesn’t go into as much detail about pedestrians. Nevertheless, the Vienna Convention glosses “pavement” with its American English equivalent. ↩︎
Seriously, though, it seems maybe the process here is “a thing looks like this and is called that, so all things that look like this will be called that, regardless of what the name means and what that might imply about the features of the thing that lead to the name being coined”.
Humans are good at making generalisations, and not that seldom the entirely wrong generalisations.
In this case a sidewalk is perhaps generalised as “a paved footway across grass”, not “a footway alongside a road”. Or something.
I’d say they defined those, because a bike is a vehicle, just like cars are.
Just like a roadway is for all vehicles, a cycletrack is just for bikes. Within those a lane is a marked one way by default part of such a road or a track. But a cycle lane is a specipic lane that’s more likely to be within a roadway rather than a cycle track.
Of cource local gov can make exceptions of those rules by allowing different vehicles or pedestrians under different rules
Pedestrians are not vehicles, they don’t need lanes.
OSM keeps the whole thing simple and a cyclewy is both a lane and a track.
kinda obvious to me, maybe missing yar folk point somewheres.
nothing has changed AFAICD, lane is part of the main road without physical separation, solid or dash line markings at best. A ‘track’… clear separation to stop motorvehicles to infract the cycle space, be it kerb, a green strip, bollards, something that makes drivers look away from their cellphone which is omnipresent and omni attention seeking here.
I think here the main road is the highway=cycleway with lane_markings=yes, which also has a pedestrian lane (described by the weirdly non-specific segregated=yes in this context). Then there’s the (sadly untagged as such) small sidepath for motor vehicles, which has something many would call a sidewalk (that used to be signed as a non-segregated cycleway)
The concept exists in Austrian traffic code too, here it is called “Nebenfahrbahn” and mapping that not a bad idea, because taking the “side-carriageway” e.g. to avoid the penalty of a traffic signal on the “main-carriageway” might incur a fine. This all in line with the concept of what a road is; manifest in the Convention on Road Traffic. A road can have several carriageways, for motor vehicles, and for cyclists too. I am forever fine with the motor vehicle ones mapped separately, tagging them as such certainly worth it.
The Convention clearly is as car centric as a document from 1968 can be expected The local traffic code (StVO) chose to differentiate between Gehweg (walkway) and Gehsteig (sidewalk) more on the signs, than on the “structural” measures. So a kerb here accounts for the same as a painted line, it is still a lane, while a sign makes it a track, regardless of separation. That is why I wrote “if somebody stole the sign” above.
okey, so your country might have a different road law than mine, or maybe you just think you know it, but in fact you’re just vague about it, just like likely all around people are, including my land of potato.
I gonna explain it along the law i know in my country
So you want to treat that cycleway as a primary around which everything is built…
Every road is for vehicles and that is it main part. It connects to houses and people can walk it unless they have got a footway.
If there is a cycleway within that road area, cyclists which are vehicles has to ride the cycleway unless it leads a differt destination the cyclist wants to reach.
Pedestrians can walk the cycleway unless there is a footway right next to it.
A foot way is not a lane!
A lane is for vehicles only and lanes are always one direction. If no lanes are marked on a street, vahicles assume two opposite direction lanes.
Pedestrians can walk both directions even if there is just one lane on a street.
Thats why footways dont have lanes for pedestrians.
Footways are not lanes.
If a footway is separated by a paint that looks like a lane… it is still not a lane.
Again, very fun forum thread, but i will never accept to call strips of a road that is specifically for pedestrians a lane.
I will also refuse to call a cycleway a lane, because a cycleway can only have lanes within it. A cycleway is not a lane by itself, just like a carridge way can have lanes marked but is not one by itself.
On top on that, in my land of potato, a cycleway can’t have lanes, because the road law forbids it. Even if someone paint em, it’s just a street art.
So please everyone, keep the definitions universal for the whole world to have different options. I really see no problems in the current OSM logic.
What is that logic? Roadways have been tagged cycleway=lane by the thousands longer than I’ve been around. We have sidewalk=* because footway=* on roadways was getting too confusing.
We’re all friends here, you can call anything anything you like. But as you say, OSM’s definitions have to be fairly universal and predictable, at least when it comes to primary feature tags and iterative refinement of them. Otherwise, data consumers have a mess on their hands and you’re going to spend most of your energy yelling at foreigners who didn’t get the memo.
Despite there being no kerb? The two rows of cobblestones are on level with asphalt.
Only if you interpret the cycleway to have a sidewalk, instead of being segregated for pedestrians (which is what the sign suggests, and is how the way is currently tagged)
Instead of, or in addition to normal sidewalk tags describing the footway on the right?
Depends on if you put more emphasis on what the road authorities write (1), what they do (2), or what they blurt out when they are trying to post-rationalize their car brainedness (3).
the traffic rules state that a sidewalk is separated by a kerb (lit. “edge stones”), but there’s no requirement on the height of this kerb
they build officially designated cycleways with sidewalk where the kerb stones are flush with the asphalt on both sides
they have defined a sidewalk as running along a carriageway, which itself is defined as the part of the road meant for vehicles, and bicycles are vehicles, yet they insist that the rules for carriageways don’t apply to cycleways because cycleways don’t have carriageways, and therefore cycleways can’t have sidewalks
I would certainly tag this as a sidewalk to the cycleway. Some communities would tag highway=path+bicycle=designated+foot=designated+ segregated=yes; I like to keep it simple.
I just look at the zebra stripes. The carriageway+sidewalk is definitely wider than the cycleway+sidewalk.
Ha, you got me there! Legislation probably is that pedestrians must use the sidewalk of the carriageway OR the sidewalk of the cycleway. No foot tag then, because the sidewalk is tagged on the carriageway itself.
While there is no (hard) separation, it is for all intends and purposes a sidewalk to the cycleway and is something I’ve done something similar for carriageways such as this one (OSM).
It should also be noted that this is a more Dutch viewpoint where cycleways are inclusive by default and segregation is purely defined by infrastructure (essentially like a road and really, that cycleway is essentially a road, just one built entirely for bicycles and not cars). This tagging also has the advantage of specifying where the footway lies in relation to the cycleway.
This is a rare example where I’d use a sidewalk=* value other than separate or no, as there’s no barrier or curb between the sidewalk and the vehicle roadway. For the cycleway, I’d map the line down the broken white line, pointing away from camera, and tag it…
The local traffic code (StVO) chose to differentiate between Gehweg (walkway) and Gehsteig (sidewalk) more on the signs, than on the “structural” measures. So a kerb here accounts for the same as a painted line, it is still a lane, while a sign makes it a track, regardless of separation. That is why I wrote “if somebody stole the sign” above.
