Width of a cycleway/cyclelane

pietervdvn commented 6 years ago

General

Another factor in the comfort of cyclists is the width of a cycleway/cyclelane. A two meter cycleway is way nicer to drive then a 1m one.

Example question: What is the width of this cycleway (in meters)?

Affected key(s) (or tags) to be modified: width

Checklist

Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):

[X] 🚧 To be added tag is established and has a useful purpose
[X] 🤔 Any answer the user can give must have an equivalent tagging (Quest should not reappear to other users when solved by one)
[ ] 🐿️ Easily answerable by everyone from the outside
[X] 💤 Not an overwhelming percentage of elements have the same answer (No spam)
[X] 🕓 Applies to a reasonable number of elements (Worth the effort)

This is not an easy question. Users should have a measuring tape on them. Therefore, I propose that this quest be disabled by default. Furthermore, measuring widths of cycleways can hinder other cyclists or can be dangerous. A warning message should be included.

Ideas for implementation

Element selection:

    way["cycleway"]["width"!~".*"]["cycleway:width"!~".*"]({{bbox}});
    way["cycleway:left"]["cycleway:left:width"!~".*"]({{bbox}});
    way["cycleway:right"]["cycleway:right:width"!~".*"]({{bbox}});

Proposed GUI: a number field.

It should show a few examples of how to measure, e.g.

    -----------+
                 |                +-----------------------------------------------------------+----+
                 +-------------+          (cyclepath)     (line defining cycleway    ^  )
    (curb)       (gutter)   <-------- Width to measure, including lines ---------->

westnordost commented 6 years ago

Perhaps the smartphone could be made into a measuring tape, using the rotation sensors and the camera.

rugk commented 6 years ago

…if that works (is accurate enough), that is an awesome idea!

westnordost commented 6 years ago

With triangulation:

The app must know in which height h from the ground the smartphone is. (user must measure that once with a measuring tape and then commit to always holding the smartphone in the same height when measuring)
User points through camera to a point, presses screen -> app registers device Z rotation α
User presses screen again -> app registers device Z rotation β (User sees a line being drawn on top of camera picture in step 2/3 from starting point to end point)

The distance on the ground is then h * tan (abs(α-β)), basically.

rugk commented 6 years ago

(user must measure that once with a measuring tape and then commit to always holding the smartphone in the same height when measuring)

Wow, no. That's a terrible UX… Especially as the user very likely won't try this at home as they do not even know they need to do so. And when they are asked to do this in the middle of mapping (on the street) that is too bad. The only way I see is to make a "calibration" menu item, so it is clear to the user this needs to be done. And, when possible, offer some default values… huh… (or just manual inut? or hide the quest?, etc.)

But if you want to do so, just FYI: The app Velocity Calculator does some similar stuff, and also needs to be calibrated.

And you may always show the calculated width and let the user confirm it (maybe also show the image taken – with a red arrow or so to show what it measured), so that if the number is unrealistic the user can catch it and notice they may have mis-calibrated their device.

treestryder commented 6 years ago

In Michigan, a true bicycle lane has to be signed and at least 4 feet when the road is 45 mph or less and 5 feet when over 45 mph, otherwise, it is just a shoulder. I found this posting, and am piggybacking off of it, as rather than specifying widths, I was going to ask if it would be possible to include the "shoulder" tag as an option in the cycleway quest, for those "lanes" that are too small or missing their sign and/or lane markings.

CloCkWeRX commented 6 years ago

I am an avid cyclist, but... are there any routers that consider this data at the moment?

Consider as well riding has many 'modes': commute, commute through a sea of pedestrians and dog walkers, road cycling, mountain bike singletrack, bmx, etc etc. IE on my cyclocross bike I am happy to hit surface=unpaved, road bike... less so.

I dont think either opencyclemap or strava, ridewithgps have cracked the 'different ride' routing barrier yet.

I do agree we should gather the data so they can long term give great cycle routing options, but its a bit "chicken or egg came first" at the mo - almost to the extent I would say lets not prompt unless cycle infrastructure is commonly "too narrow to safely use in two directions"

althio commented 6 years ago

@CloCkWeRX

[...] are there any routers that consider this data at the moment? [...] I dont think either opencyclemap or strava, ridewithgps have cracked the 'different ride' routing barrier yet.

More or less experimental routing, with several profiles or custom profiles:

http://brouter.de/brouter/ | http://brouter.de/brouter-web/ (a lot and custom)
https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (3 bikes profiles)
https://www.geovelo.fr (at least under the hood I think)

Etua commented 6 years ago

For places with established cycleways standards like big cities this quest would create massive amount of repetitive answers.

rugk commented 5 years ago

https://github.com/hollma/abstandrechner does something similar in JS. (see demo with lines, where you can likely also esimate the street width)

Etua commented 5 years ago

I'm still not very fond of quest with that margin of error as I believe that having no data is better than wrong input. Unless we specifically ask for proper measurement or allow only 3 general answers, the results derived from the same place depending on the user may vary too much to ignore it. That dismisses this quest completely to me.

pietervdvn commented 4 years ago

By now, I did clone streetcomplete and wrote my own quest for this and related issues.

To measure, I have bought a laser meter. Furthermore, this is a bit complicated to do (changes in width, ...) so this is indeed not a quest suited for streetcomplete.