But it’s something that we could and should survey for OSM. Broad-brush AADT equivalents (Average Annual Daily Traffic) are actually pretty easy to survey

I’m kind of interested. I looked through the OSM wiki for AADT and volume but couldn’t find anything in a casual search… Is there any existing AADT or related tagging or OSM guidelines or information on how to survey it?

A35K:

Now fast forward a few weeks and I found out that this tag is extensively used in Munich to “improve” bicycle routing. I don´t fully agree with the way the people there implemeted it as now busy roads are tagged as “better” as seperate cycleways due to irrelevant things such as width.

But this illustrates the problem with subjective tags like class:bicycle. Everyone will have a different idea of what a “better” roadway is.

Further, standards will vary between regions (e.g. what’s considered a good cycleway in Bavaria will probably be different from what’s a good cycleway in the Netherlands). So the only way to use class:bicycle extensively is to have a locally-agreed and well-documented guideline as to what the different classes are. But that will likely describe things like speed limit, presence of cycleways, incline, access control, or other objective characteristics that could be tagged instead.

It seems to me that the main remaining use of a class:bicycle tag would be to discourage routing bicycles over streets or roads that are bad for cycling for reasons difficult to describe with data. For example if a residential street is illegally but frequently used as a cut-through by car drivers, but accurate traffic level data is not available. Or if the legal speed limit and actual vehicle speeds are very notably different.

Richard:

That’s because it’s a terrible subjective tag and shouldn’t be used. Much better to tag objective speed limits and traffic levels.

I generally agree with this view, but given that accurate data on traffic levels is largely not available under a free licence, it’s a bit of a moot point and doesn’t address real pain points that people have.

However in this case it seems like avoiding roads with a 80 km/h speed limit and no cycleway would have handled the problem without needing a class:bicycle tag?

(That being said - I really like cycle.travel’s routing, it usually manages to find the best out of my region’s bad cycle infra - thanks Richard!)

Hello all, I was reminded of this diary entry by weeklyOSM https://weeklyosm.eu/archives/14940 after the discussion on talk-ca https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2021-October/010127.html

I find the objections raised by commenters here and in the talk-ca thread interesting.

Warning, example relation links posted here are for huge relations that might seriously slow your browser.

The maintainability and “cumbersomeness” hasn’t stopped OSM from adding any other amount of detail. I could point to examples like PTv2 relations for long-distance buses such as osm.org/relation/10715333 spanning hundreds of kilometres and thousands of OSM ways. This is a tooling and database issue and as far as I know OSM’s approach has always been to make the database as good as possible and not worry about storage or RAM.

Lack of community consensus hasn’t stopped relations for the Alps osm.org/relation/2698607 (did you know Vienna is in the Alps?), for the Berliner Urstromtal osm.org/relation/2218270 (with fuzzy borders drawn as random guesswork long straight lines), or indeed if we wish for maritime examples, for the Pomeranian Bay (osm.org/relation/9037646) which even has that imaginary straight line “separating” it from the main sea.

I gave two of these examples in a response to woodpeck/Frederik Ramm on talk-ca, unfortunately to no response.

Now, you can say that there is no consensus that adding these examples in Europe was a good idea. But evidently there is also no consensus that adding these is a bad idea and that they should be deleted. Until these prominent examples in Europe are addressed in some way, trying to claim “no consensus” for the same kind of edits in Canada feels more than a little like pulling up the drawbridge once you’re in.

I must say that encoding Hans Island as “administered” by Denmark is going to be fairly amusing if anyone ends up there expecting any administrative infrastructure.

Hi GPIOIPG, I saw links to this post in weeklyOSM. Maybe you’ll find it interesting or helpful: About a year ago I looked at similar issue for Vancouver rapid transit. When I looked at rapid transit elsewhere in U.S. and Canada, I saw unfortunately little consistency - some cities tend to use “Station” suffix, others don’t. Summary here: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2017-November/008188.html