I’ve stopped this project in Sep 2020, mostly because I learned that I had misunderstood the concept of a “shared lane” on Dutch roads. There aren’t nearly as many as I had thought. Another project has spun off, though: checking primary and secondary roads in my area for bike accessibility. Primaries, in particular, are not usually open for bikes: either there’s an adjacent compulsory bike path (typically G12a) or bikes are forbidden explicitly (board NL:C9 or NL:C15). I’ve learned that the hard way when Komoot (based on OSM data) sent me on one such secondary one day. That particular problem was fixed the same day, and it got me started on surveying primaries and secondaries (in person, using Mapillary, or using public data on Dutch road signs) in my area. Here’s the corresponding Overpass query: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/YvO

Old text below:

I see a tendency to equip more and more local secondary and tertiary highways with either an adjacent bike path or an (advisory) bike lane = fietssuggestiestrook, cycleway=shared_lane in OSM speak. This isn’t always reflected in OSM, yet. I’ve fixed some that I’ve come across, but I suspect there’s many more.

Because I find that they matter for bicycle routing, I’ll try and survey those that I can access easily, in province Groningen. Mapillary will help reduce my mileage. The idea is to tag all secondary and tertiary highways outside of town (buiten de bebouwde kom) with a cycleway tag (cycleway=no if none is present), except if they’re tagged bicycle=no or bicycle=use_sidepath. While I’m at it, I’ll also set mofa and moped tags, surface, and where surveyed locally: smoothness. Things like weight limits, updated speed limits and so on will be by-catch.

Why secondary and tertiary? Primary highways and up don’t come with bike lanes in this country. They typically come with adjacent bike tracks, which are typically mapped already. “Unclassified” highways, on the other hand, are typically too small for bike lanes. This leaves us with secondary and tertiary.

Why out of town? Mostly because I prefer cycling in the nature :) But also because I have the impression that highways in town get a good amount of attention from my fellow mappers, already (which is great!). That’s less true ‘op het platteland.’ That’s where I come in.

Here’s an Overpass query to identify targets:

[out:xml][timeout:90]; 
area[admin_level=4]["name"="Groningen"][boundary=administrative]->.searchArea; // specify: within province (admin_level=4) 
( 
  way[highway ~ '^terti'][!cycleway][!bicycle][maxspeed~'[68]0'](area.searchArea); 
  way[highway ~ '^terti'][!cycleway][bicycle=yes][maxspeed~'[68]0'](area.searchArea); 
  way[highway ~ '^secon'][!cycleway][!bicycle][maxspeed~'[68]0'](area.searchArea); 
  way[highway ~ '^secon'][!cycleway][bicycle=yes][maxspeed~'[68]0'](area.searchArea); 
); 
(._;>;);
out meta;

Note that I’m relying on the maxspeed tag here to exclude highways within town. This isn’t fool-proof and notably excludes highways for which maxspeed isn’t set. You would want to craft your query much more carefully for, say, an automated edit. Since that’s not what I’m planning, I can live with a certain error margin. I’ll sort out the rest later. Low-hanging fruit comes first.