Too many cycleway quests with the same answer!

[cyclingcat]

Hi there,

this afternoon I cycled some kilometres into a village nearby through another village, both with at least 2000 inhabitants each. They are typical villages here: One main road (highway=primary/secondary) and a network of many living streets (highway=residential). While previous versions of SC showed very few street-related quests anymore, this changed with v26.0 dramatically: Tons of sidewalk and cycleway quests popping up, and while the answers to the former are quite varying, those to the latter are really monotonous: I solved about 100 cycleway quests but haven't met a single one with an answer other than "No cycleway on both sides"! This isn't really surprising as living streets of typical villages usually don't have cycling lanes/paths, because of the very little car traffic.

This smells spammy to me, at least in those regions. You can probably pick any German village, load the quests and find many, many cycleway quests of which >99% would have to be answered with "No cycleway on both sides". The few exceptions could be cycling lanes/paths along longer living streets having the character of main roads but still tagged as "residential".

I'm afraid that users get bored and soon disable this (otherwise very valuable) quest - doing always the same 5 taps is very tedious (and meets the definition of spam), but I have no idea how to mitigate this. Somehow distinguish between smaller and bigger places (= don't show the cycleway quest for residential streets in smaller villages, but what about huge residential areas of bigger towns then where the same problem would occur)?

So I opened this issue, hoping that someone reading this with a deeper insight into the structure of OSM will have a brilliant idea how to handle this.

The cycling cat

[westnordost]

With living streets, you don't mean highway=residential, not highway=living_street, right?

[matkoniecz]

this changed with v26.0 dramatically: Tons of sidewalk and cycleway quests popping up

Note that at least partially this may be a bug - see #2248

[westnordost]

Well, I still changed it so that the cycleway quest is also shown for residential roads.

[westnordost]

But no method how to distinguish between big and small places or places with high traffic and low traffic comes to my mind.

[cyclingcat]

With living streets, you don't mean highway=residential, not highway=living_street, right?

Yes, "highway=residential". (Sorry for the confusion, I wasn't aware that there is "highway=living_street" as well.)

Note that at least partially this may be a bug - see #2248

But I don't mean cases where there are cycleways nearby! Here I'm considering pure residential areas with many streets, typically 50 m (often dead ends) to 500 m long, with none to little through traffic, just cars of residents, visitors and the odd parcel delivery. Those ones very rarely have any kinds of cycleways...

The cycling cat

[westnordost]

Ok, I see no other possibility other than disabling the quest for residential roads again.

[RubenKelevra]

This might be just a German thing, I've seen quite a lot cycle ways in the Netherlands in cities along residential roads.

Maybe we can just tone it down for Germany at the moment, where this seems to be not the case in general?

Another option would be to add a button to the sidewalk quest, and let the user choose between 'ok' and 'there's also a cycleway' for residential streets.

So in a rare case that there's a cycleway the user's can hit this button and the cycle quest pops up next?

This would reduce the spam character of this quest on residential streets in countries where there are very little cycle lanes/ways like Germany.

[FloEdelmann]

I also answered some of those new cycleway quests with v26.0 in a small German town. While most answers were indeed "no cycleways", there were also a few streets where bikes are explicitly allowed on the sidewalk. Those would have been missed otherwise. So I wouldn't mind if residential streets were included.

[DerDings]

Ok, I see no other possibility other than disabling the quest for residential roads again.

I see some criteria how to determine whether a residential road is likely to have cycleways or sidewalks enabled for bicycles:

• The necessity and thus the presence of cycleways depends (among other criteria) on motorcars' speed on that road.
  Speaking for Germany, bicycle lanes are not even allowed in DE:zone30 zones, so it is inevitable that the answer is "no cycle way" in a vast majority of those streets.
  -> I think it is a good idea to at least ask the cycleway quest for residential roads with maxspeed>30 (or similar tags like maxspeed:type=DE:urban), while ignoring all other roads. To avoid spam, roads without tagged maxspeeds should be excluded.

• Additionally, there are some one-way roads which have a bicycle lane for the opposite direction.
  -> So the cycleway quest may also be asked for residential roads with oneway=yes + oneway:bicycle=no, regardless wether there is any speed limit. (this is also possible in Germany as long as the maxspeed is not a zone)

[westnordost]

Ok, that thing with > 30kmh is a good idea

[FloEdelmann]

For reference, this was fixed in 6502a21 and improved in #2448