Cycling is not one thing

To most people cycling is just something people do as exercise and if you’ve seen one bike you’ve seen them all. To someone that has become deeply embedded into the cycling community at a national level as my hometown area has become a cycling hub for every variety of biking there is my view of biking has become quite diverse and how I’ve approached mapping cycling has matured and grown. I think a lot of people within the OSM community look at osm.wiki/Bicycle and scroll through pages and think, man it looks like you’ve got is all covered. However, I see this page I almost entirely see one type of cycling covered: Urban/Suburban Commuting.

So maybe a good place to start is to cover the variety of types of cycling that exist and how they are distinct and how they are also tangibly intertwined.

Even in listing these I tried to stop and logically break things in to categories like on-road, off-road, and closed circuit or hard-surface vs. soft surface of even high speed (sport) vs. low speed (recreation/commuting) but even here these starts to bleed together. For instance MTB racing has started to include gravel runs, so has cross country (XC), so has the Tour de France which is decidedly road.

Thus in no particular order here are some of the larger categories of biking and at a high level difference in how they function as it relates to biking.

Road Biking

Think tradition asphalt, curved handle bars, Lycra , fully human powered, and fast. From a mapping perspective this requires a lot of similar things to road mapping like speed limits but there is a particular interest in if roads have shoulders or if it’s an established mountain road that people train then there can be little difference.

Mountain Biking (MTB)

… See full entry