Cycle lanes

[etienne-s]

What's the meaning of the different colors for cycle lanes?

It seems that black means no cycle lane at all, but I can't figure out the difference between red and absence of color.

[FloEdelmann]

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete/Overlays:

• red: tagging might be incorrect, incomplete or missing completely
• transparent: cycleway=separate
• black: cycleway=no

[matkoniecz]

transparent may be also used where data is missing but is unlikely to be worth adding that cycleway is missing there

wiki edited in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=StreetComplete/Overlays&diff=prev&oldid=2905682

[etienne-s]

Thanks! But how is it determined whether a road is colored red or transparent?
In other words, when data is missing for a road, how does StreetComplete decide whether it should be added or not?
I'm asking because sometimes I see roads that look very similar, yet some are colored red while others are transparent.

[mnalis]

In other words, when data is missing for a road, how does StreetComplete decide whether it should be added or not?

There are quite a few details how StreetComplete tries to heuristically determine whether it is more likely to be worth mapping or not (i.e. whether explicit cycleway tagging should be expected there for full information, or is it implied).

Some human readable comments are here, but the interesting stuff is in Kotlin code, and starts here (look for OverlayColor. to see what is colored in which color)

That heuristic is not trivial by any means (nor is it perfect), and depends not only on dozens of different tags, but also on country in question; so it is probably too long to detail here line by line in English (as it might end up being a smaller chapter in the book 😅 )¹

But if you're not satisfied with "Imaging a black box that determines whether mapping cycleway info if worthwhile..." explanation 😸, but want to know all the gory details, look especially at cyclewayTaggingNotExpected and cyclewayTaggingNotExpectedFilter in that code -- even if you're not a programmer, you should be able to glean a lot information from it, as names are chosen to be informative. ²

Just keep in mind that:

• || means or,
• && means and,
• things in Filter like "highway ~ track|living_street|pedestrian|xxx" means "if highway=* tag matches any of those values separated by | ")

... and it should be mostly readable (feel free to ask if you get stuck on interpreting something)

Footnotes

1. e.g. cycleway tagging might not be expected on service roads, but might be on bigger roads, but not if it is expressway; also it might not be expected if road has unpaved surface, but should if it has paved surface, but only if that paved road is not in reduced speed traffic zone; but it also should be skipped if the road itself is already marked as bicycle road or cycle street. But even if it might be expected for cycleway to be mapped regularly, it should not be expected if that road segment happens to be link road or roundabout junction on side of the road where it would be in contraflow, which depends whether it is a left or right-side driving country etc... It gets complex 😰 ↩

2. Knowing meaning of raw OSM tags (i.e. their OSM wiki definitions) however is likely a prerequisite, as tags do not always mean what the English words they are composed of might suggest. (They are often pretty close, but not always...) ↩

[etienne-s]

Thanks a lot for this detailed answer, I couldn't have hoped for more!