OpenStreetMap
From what I can tell, OpenStreetMap lacks a tag allowing mappers to mark (yes, subjectively) roads that are unsafe for cyclists. In my opinion, this feature really ought to be added. It’s the last feature that’s needed for services like Komoot to actually become highly useful.
In State College, North Atherton Street is almost always too busy for cyclists; as such it’s generally avoided.
This has been discussed previously, but no official answer has arisen. It behooves OSM to come up with a fix to this problem.
What do you recommend with regard to adding this tag?
Discussion
Comment from Rovastar on 1 November 2019 at 01:56
Always difficult but I would be against it would be against it due to the subjective nature of safe.
Personally i think this info could be derived from the existing data. for me a 4 lane primary road (without a dedicated cycle lane) probably isn’t suitable for most cyclists (although 25mph limit might be). If apps used the info in OSM to give options for the user based on types of roads and other existing popular tags (safest route option, don’t use 4 lane primary, risky routes options, allow these, etc, etc)
The problem with adding subject tags is where do you stop. Would you add safe hours like opening times to this stretch of road? (i imagine when there is less traffic off peak time it is safer and you might go along it)
What about roads in bad/rough neighborhoods where you could have attacked? There are probably roads you might not cycle or walk alone along that you know. do you add tags to osm warning of no go areas? Poor/ghetto area tags?
Comment from SK53 on 1 November 2019 at 14:32
This issue has been discussed really extensively since the start of OSM, which is now over 15 years ago. OSMs initial growth was very much with the cycling community: there were no real alternative maps suitable for cyclists. Although there were some early thoughts on something called “cycling suitability”, see for example the discussion of the Cheltenham Standard.
The problem is as stated one of subjectivity: the view of a fit cycle courier as what is suitable to cycle will be very different from a casual cyclists. Furthermore, the single most important factor — traffic volume — is not suitable for OSM tagging. As other critical information for generating cycle routes is also not available in OSM, such as elevation profiles, most routers enhance OSM from other (usually open) data sources.
I’ve checked with Richard Fairhurst’s cycle.travel and this will select routes which avoid Atherton St in State College for N-S routes. cycle.travel is optimised for longer routes rather than cycle commutes, but it makes use of elevation, and traffic data (when available), and is a useful reference implementation of a cycle router using OSM data.
Cyclestreets routing is only available in the UK, but this is another very long-standing cycle routing implementation using OSM, and will usually create similar routes avoiding busy roads. There are numerous other cycle routers, but it happens I’m most familiar with these, and also they are both very mature. Most important in this context is that they show that subjective type tags are not necessary.
TLDR; cycling suitability tagging was considered in OSM’s early days, but experience in implementing sophisticated cycle routing apps shows that it is not needed.
Comment from giggls on 1 November 2019 at 14:59
Previous comments already stated what I think about such a tag also.
Even tracktype which is way more objective is somewhat difficult in practise.
There is also the highly customizable Software Brouter which has a global OSM database: http://brouter.de/brouter-web/
A small test shows that “North Atherton Street “ seems to be already avoided by this Software.
Comment from Weatherman1228 on 2 November 2019 at 11:38
Yes, that is needed.
Comment from pangoSE on 3 November 2019 at 06:26
No, for reasons stated above.