But it's great you had the thought to make these changes! The current tagging scheme not immediately intuitive and I can see why you would've upgraded these roads.

Looking forward to seeing more of your contributions :)

Prior, Venables & 12th Avenue are classified as Secondary Arterials by the City.

While they do have higher traffic volumes traffic, these roads are not part of the Major Road Network and with the exception of Prior street, are not designated truck routes.

For these reasons, these roads should remain as Tertiary highways, not Secondary.

The dataset is found in the city's OpenData Portal at this address https://opendata.vancouver.ca/explore/dataset/bikeways/

Yeah, I felt the same way haha. I finally felt confident enough to make these changes after working on some smaller scale areas.

I see what you're saying about mapping them separately, I actually went through the same line of thought as you and went back and forth between the idea of separating podiums from their towers.

I think neither what I did here or the alternative you've suggested is the right way going forward, and I'll explain below.

I think it's much better to have one way to represent the whole building, and parts to represent distinct portions. In general, towers and podiums should be mapped as building parts as part of a single building footprint. This is because the podium and tower portions of buildings usually have distinct internal layouts and typically have different building materials and architectural design/visual look.

Having two separate building ways define the same structure is bad data to have in OSM. Splitting towers from podiums as separate buildings would imply that the podium structure is comprised of two adjacent buildings, which is usually isn't the case in real life.

Mapping them as separate building parts as I've done here has the exact same problem, as it implies that the podium portion of the tower area is a separate unit than the rest of the podium.

This would be problematic when we have retail usage at the podium level, since separating the parts into two buildings would imply that the retail area is located within two distinct buildings, instead of one comprehensive shopping structure.

How I think I should have mapped the Brentwood towers is having the entire podium footprint mapped as a building part, and then the tower portion mapped as a building part on top of it with the building:min_level= tag starting at the first floor above the podium.

The Marine Gateway development (osm.org/way/360225154) is a good example of what I'm talking about here. If the office tower above the cineplex was mapped as a separate structure, the supposed "building" would have cut straight through the cineplex, Winners and T&T supermarket.

I think a good way to think about it is to imagine walking through the building. If there is a corridor that ends up crossing two mapped buildings, then maybe they shouldn't be separate.

So at the end of the day, I think that the guidelines in the wiki actually have it right. We should be using building parts, just not quite the way I've done it here.

The median along Cambie is not a traffic island. Medians are bigger and longer, and are used to seperate opposing directions of traffic. Traffic islands are intended for traffic calming and are very localized. It would be best to remove this tag from the median.

I absolutely agree; I think it's great!

Yeah that makes sense. Thanks for looking it over!

Hey Joel,

Great question!I agree with you in general, I like to show bike path as seperate geometry as well. This generally works well where the infrastructure is standalone or has unique pathing and connections that are useful for cyclists using the map to navigate.

The differentiating factor for me comes down to whether the municipality treats cyclists as vehicles or pedestrians in the design of the infrastructure. (Which gets annoying because they can't seem to make up their mind, and sometimes you go from one to the other within the same route)

In general, I would say that drawing it separate from the roadways is warranted when if the cycle lane is part of a Multi-Use Path or is provided a dedicated crosswalk/signal when it crosses intersections, then it's most likely better to draw it separate from the road. (Such as the cycle infrastructure along Gilmore in central Burnaby, or the Central Valley Greenway in False Creek)

Otherwise, it's best to just tag the road with the cycle track since it's essentially an additional vehicle lane that is reserved for bikes (which is the case within this area).

Hope that helps! I've been thinking of starting getting documentation on the wiki for this as well sometime since we seem to be getting exponentially more bike infrastructure in the region and it would be nice to have a consistent standard.

Nyan

That makes sense to me; will revise.

Nyan Saik