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 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/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)
Think soft surface trails with berms, jumps, and technical features or just really steep downhills. These typically will have IMBA ratings as the key metric but because many of these navigate natural terrain they will commonly have bridges, tunnels, street crossings, and so forth that many times mean they need routes similar to highways to keep the IMBA and naming consistent. You may even ideally have Route Masters for cover all the trails that are part of a park or trail system to keep them associated with the Park or Land Manager. Something MTBers probably would love to see more racking of by trail is something missing from OSM right now which is a list of technical trail features (TTFs) Rock Gardens, Ladder Bridges, Wall Rides, Drops, Jumps, Skinnies, the list goes on.
Cyclo-cross (CX)
Light skinny but nobby wheels great for uphills but the typical lack of suspension make it a little worse for downhills with and small drops. These races tend to shorter and faster so there are tradeoffs to focus on speed but slighter risk of flat. Ironically CX might actually include bike dismount required stair sections which seems to not have anything to do with biking but these types of scrambles are build into CX courses.
Cross Country (XC)
Okay these are admittedly pretty close to Mountain Bikes but they are purpose built for racing generally but not always with less travel, more efficient pedaling, and lighter weight.
Urban/Suburban Commuting
This where you switch from not caring if you are sharing the road with cars (road biking) to that being the least ideal option and you want to know the route with the most separated multi-use, bike lane, and low speed mixed use routes you can find. Ideally the types you’d feel safe for your 7-8 year old riding along. As covered above a lot of what is cover on the bicycle page.
BMX
These either will be areas with lots of ride-able features something something like skate park or these can be purpose built closed course with high jumps huge wall climbs. These would be OSM Track but they would care about and have some cross over with the Technical Trail Features (TTFs) at MTBers but theirs would have some features dropped and different ones added.
Pump Track
This is distinct in that you start with a short burst of peddling and then pump the bike to maintain speed with really tight turns many of these are built to even be ridden slalom for competitive side by side racing. No Features here. Some of these will look more like a small closed loop trails but some are better of as just areas.
Gravel
This is one of the fastest growing but hardest to map types of cycling on OSM because it focuses on back country gravel/dirt roads that most people consider to be for driving and moving around farm equipment only. If anything this is the one that I’ve had the most people on OSM come back behind and revert of overwrite changes made because mostly when I’ve asked because the through was if it’s not exclusively marked or signed in some ways then it should be left alone and people can just figure it out. Luckily our area has actually grown such a community and faced this type of push back in real like that they’ve actually start signing common routes in mass. That combine MUTCD Recreational and Caution symbology with Farming, Bike, and even hiking symbology as in addition to vehicle we have a lot of these in our area. See Respect Rural Road. These routes focus and prioritize gravel and then a bit of dirt over anything paved but then care about highway shoulders when rural routes don’t precisely align. They also look for bike=yes and grade.
Summary
To map biking can mean mapping roads sure but not just bike lanes and side paths but speeds/shoulder, soft surface single track, rural roads, or closed circuit, and even public land paths as bikes really cross the gambit of road and non-road infrastructure of every type.
Discussion
Comment from ChristianA on 30 January 2025 at 07:01
Good post! Perhaps the wiki should be extended to also mention other forms of cycling. Of course, there will be some differences in mapping for different countries, but some general text might be useful anyway.
Comment from JPinAR on 1 February 2025 at 05:37
This actually isn’t what I think the wiki needs to be. This is the introduction to why we need more consistency and conversation around cycle mapping. The document I’m pulling from is 36 pages long, so loads more to come.