"For example, if Portland OR has data on which roads have bike lanes, it could probably be part of a bulk upload. Meanwhile, I'm pinging away tagging bike lanes as I find them."

So this is exactly what Trimet would like to do. I'm on the newly hired team at Trimet to get relevant routing (bike routes, centerlines, sidewalks, trails) public domain data from RLIS, Portland, and other agencies (see http://www.civicapps.org/ for available datasets) on to OSM. Trimet is switching to open source trip planner (http://maps5.trimet.org/otp/) and open source data (OSM). If you or anyone has experience with bulk imports or simply has input, please email me at houserp@trimet.org. I would love some input!