Draft:United States/Cycling

This page is a template and hopefully conversation stater focused on covering the best practices and opportunities of mapping cycling in the United States across multiple disciplines, including but not limited to: Road, Mountain (MTC), Cyclo-cross (CX), Cross Country (XC), Urban/Suburban Commuting, BMX, Pump Track, Gravel, Bike Packing (also known as touring), Adaptive Cycling, and more as area of conversation come up. As bikes cross the trail, road, pedestrian, and ironically building storage spaces (because of eBike bans in some places) this page is focused on aligning with those overlaps and expand as suitable.

This will also be a place for discussion about technical oddities like how switching between bike lanes and multi-use paths aren't clear either in physical or logical mapping layers and possible solutions/approaches to improve or this things like this. Also, this page is intended to complement not conflict with or contradict best practice on either the road, trail, or pedestrian sides of mapping cycling. Be aware that cycling sits in a bit of a cultural and mapping gray area as differing positions many times within the same community can argue bikes don't belong on sidewalks, but conversely don't belong on roads wither. For soft surface trails, bikes also sit in a technologically developing market where things like eBikes, electric unicycles (EUCs), electric dirt bikes (like Surons), and electric adaptive biking all jokey for position. Off the roads and in urban applications, eBikes with cheap batteries have also caused concerns and bans about the storage and charging of eBikes which themselves have mapping consideration.

Background

Cycling is not one thing. To most people cycling is just something people do for 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.

The mere fact that bike can be way fasted than pedestrians but not as fast as cars puts cycling in a bit of an uncanny valley where two towns only miles apart has one trying to ban bikes from roads while the other is trying to ban them from sidewalks. Thus bike mapping typically can involve mixing of on and off-road multi-use mapping and intermixing the two is a bit 'clunky' on OSM when a bike lane ends how do you physically map the multi-use path suddenly appearing out of know where to match the physical location before it veer away from the road and becomes its own right of-way? Or logically, how should a cycling router handle the hand off between bike lane and separated path? Do you need to join pedestrian traffic, use multiple cross walks, split the lane and use an advances stop line with bike box, cross traffic? What if your bike lane is on the right and the right turn lane cross so that the bike lane is now split between the right turn and forward progressing traffic? And that's just the issues with Urban and Suburban mapping.

Cycling is also in a bit of a technological renaissance where the space of things claiming and wanting to participate in cycling especially in soft surface areas is suddenly crowded of course you have eBikes which in the U.S. has its Class system of I, II, III but what about bikes that are outside those classes? Are electric unicycles (EUCs) eBikes? How about more powerful bikes like Surrons that would be more apply described as e-Dirt Bikes? Okay then let's put limits on power output? But at higher power EUCs don't peel out and damage trails (backed by U.S. Trail Service studies) but Surrons definitely do and how about Adaptive eBike that might need that extra power legitimately or larger eCargo Bikes used in delivery application? The point I'm getting out here is even defining what is and is not a cycle is difficult, heck I'm using the work cycle because bicycle is too specific to over unicycles like EUCs or trikes/quads used for trekking, cargo, and adaptive.

Types of Cycling

A good place to perhaps start is to understand the various forms that cycling takes. Here is a start, and this list is apt to grow as this page progresses in development.

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 to 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 tracking of on OSM would be the ability to list of technical trail features (TTFs) Rock Gardens, Ladder Bridges, Wall Rides, Drops, Jumps, Skinnies, the list goes on that a particular trail contains.

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 even 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 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) as 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 off 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](https://www.arkansasr3.com/safety/). 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.

Bike Packing

This is like long distance Gravel with more emphasis on resupplying, camping/lodging, and for ebikes perhaps charging. Think of may rails-to-trails project that could take multiple days to complete. Like the Katy Trail from Kansas City, MO to St.Louis, MO pretty much an entire U.S. State's width.

Taking a Break

I'm not done with this page, this is just the introduction. I plan to start next on mapping paved roads for bicycles. Look forward to picking this back up if you have an idea or topics you would like covered even though this is in Draft feel free to add to the Discussion page. Especially if there is something I've already missed or need to fix.