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My workmates and I are trying to use OSM data about bicycle routes and other touristic infrastructure for the assessment of cultural ecosystem services. First, we compared the OSM data to official data to get an idea of completeness and correctness of the data. However, the completeness of the data for our region near the Bavarian-Czech border is surprisingly low, many cycleways seem to be missing in OSM.

Interestingly, there are some roads and tracks in OSM, which might be used by cyclists but they don´t have any bicycle tags. Some are tagged as "hiking" for example. I already read the OSM guidance on how to tag new data but at least some of these routes are obviously not correctly tagged.

Can you please help me and explain to me how others extract cycle routes from OSM data without missing the incorrectly tagged parts? It must be possible because cycling apps, which are based on OSM, don´t have as many gaps. Are they corrected manually?

I hope, you can help me.

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    Can you show examples of incomplete bicycle data? Maybe you are misinterpreting something.
    – scai
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 7:44
  • It looks like the highway=cycleway designation refers to "a separate way for the use of cyclists". But roads that are classified as highway=residential may be perfectly suitable for bicycling even if they don't have a designated bicycle lane. So I suggest defining your own criteria for "bicycle route" based on the information that's available in OSM for your region. Then you can start to refine that dataset based on any other sources you can find.
    – csk
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 19:09
  • My guess is that what you think you have obtained as "bicycle routes" from OSM is not actually the same as the "bicycle routes" you've obtained from another source. In English a "bicycle route" could be path cosntructed especially for cyclists, a list of paths suitable for cyclists and signed for them, or just where cyclists happen to go. You need to define exactly what data (keys and values) you're comparing with with.
    – SomeoneElse
    Commented May 23, 2019 at 13:33

2 Answers 2

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OSM data is crowd-sourced. It's created by many people who volunteer their time. As such, it's often incomplete.

The cycling apps you're referring to have most likely filled in the gaps of OSM data with their own proprietary data. Such data is obtained by tracking the cycling routes of the people using the app. This creates a positive feedback cycle where the more users an app has, the better the route coverage, and the more useful the app is to its users, which leads more people to want to use the app.

This means that while the data you want exists, it's not available for free. In fact, you probably can't even buy it. After all, why would an app developer sell you data that would allow you to compete with them? It's their core asset.

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Generaly, OSM conventions about bicycle ways tagging more strict than average official data. Road may be have road signs as "bicycle road", but OSM editors may deside not tag this road as bicycle, because it not complain with state standarts for bicycle road, and not correctly separated from other traffic.

You may use more complex queries to determine potentialy bicycle ways, e.q "If highway has more than 3 lanes and have alternative parralel roads than it not good to bicycle"

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