Render cycleway=lane with cycleway:buffer=* as cycleway=track

[Clara Hobbs]

A buffered bike lane has physical separation between bike and car traffic in the form of a marked-out area of asphalt that is not to be used by any vehicles. Thus, they're generally safer than and preferred over unbuffered bike lanes, more akin to tracks (which have physical barriers between motor and bike traffic). I suggest they therefore be rendered similarly to tracks, as a solid blue casing rather than dashed.

[Lucas Verney]

Hi,

Thanks for the proposal! Indeed, I agree that a cycleway=lane with a (somewhat large) buffer should in practice resemble a cycleway=track. I do have some concerns however regarding the cycleway:buffer tag:

1. Wiki page is quite poor and indicating this is a de factor tag.
2. Usage is quite sparse, mainly US + Belgium, and when looking by values, many are not that much exploitable. Chronology has plateau and looks like few contributors tagging. See taginfo.
3. The tag unit is meters (not whether or not there is a buffer), and in my own tagging experience, tags with meter units are very often disregarded by contributors (see example width for the width of the cycleways).

Not sure whether this would apply worldwide or locally (I'm based in France) but I think that the illustrative image from the wiki page would have been tagged as a cycleway=track by most contributors in Western Europe.

Adding additional tag rendering has a direct impact on CyclOSM performance, and it is already quite difficult to serve the style for worldwide usage on osm.org. Then, I'd rather not render the extra cycleway:buffer tag, but I'm happy to take feedbacks if you think I missed something.

Best