Cycling highways are a ‘thing’ in Belgium and The Netherlands, or rather, they will be.

Some stretches already exist, others are still in the planning phase.

The intent is to have them as bidirectional ways for cyclists, ideally 4m wide, without car traffic. Often alongside railroads or canals, sometimes instead of disused railways. Where they cross motorways bridges are planned.

Usually they are also open to pedestrians, horseback riders, skeelers, etc. Some were not open to speed_pedelecs, but that is getting resolved.

In practice there will be certain parts that will always be ‘shared’ with car traffic though and where they cross busy national roads the cyclists won’t have priority for obvious reasons. Building bridges and tunnels everywhere is not possible either.

So more than half of them are still in the planning stage. On OpenStreetMap I like the ability to show where they are planned.

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First of all, I would like to thank the organisers of the State of the Map to invite me as a scholar and HOT to extend this invitation to the HOT summit.

It’s an incredible experience. I met many new people, but also people I had been communicating with online and that I now meet in real life. It’s a great networking opportunity.

I gave a talk about PT_Assistant, which was received really well. So the next day I did a more interactive session working on a single bus route in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which we converted to PT v2, or at least the way I like to interpret it, keeping it as simple as possible, while still expressing all that’s needed for it to be useful.

osm.org/relation/8771035 osm.org/relation/10063024 osm.org/relation/8771035

(Work in progress)

During the summer of 2019 Ashish Singh worked on further improvements to PT_Assistant. He improved the data model, which led to a better functioning of sorting stops in public transport routes. It could also lead to nicer visualisations of the routes, but that has not been implemented yet.

In this diary entry I want to highlight some of the new features and explain others that existed before.

Public transport

Validator

In the validator everything related to public transport is prepended with PT:

• It can detect that routes can be fixed by simply resorting the ways

• Or that stops aren’t served.

• It also reports when the highway is not suitable for the mode of transport

• Or that the vehicle goes against oneway traffic, or takes a turn where there is a turn restriction

Visualisation

The route that is currently selected or for which the relation editor has focus (it’s on top) is highlighted in purple with the stops in yellow. The stops have the ref of the route, followed by a sequence number.

Relation Editor

Routing Helper

• The routing helper was added last year and is now better on (wrongly) split roundabouts

• There is also a new option, which makes it possible to split the way that is painted in white. The way that was added last in most cases. If a user does this by selection option 8, they get the possibility to make a turn before the white way’s end node is reached. The user selects option 1, 2 or 3. Often there is only 1, or goes further back by using option 8. Once a turn is selected, it is the white way that is split and the side road becomes the new white way.

Demo

Stops sorter

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