Hi Richard,
cycle.travel has been an indispensable tool for our route planning far and near – thank you so much for creating it! – but recently I've ended up on far more "rough" roads here in the German capital than before.
Berlin has an awful lot of side streets with often terrible-to-ride cobblestone surface (commonly tagged by our local OSM community as either `cobblestone` or, more commonly, `sett`) and, as far as I recall, cycle.travel used to indicate those streets as dashed and routes on them in green as compared to the solid line and blue which was a pretty reliable indicator when planning rides on the 16-inch Brompton. Unfortunately, this seems to have changed with a recent software update?
For example, road https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/147563892 is still marked as dashed and green, whereas https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/101290094 has a solid line and delivers blue routes – both streets have the same painful Berlin-style cobblestone surface that most serious cyclists here try to avoid at all cost. The difference appears to be that the former is tagged as `cobblestone` (which cycle.travel indicates as "unpaved road", when I click on a via point) while the latter uses the `sett` surface tag. Similarly, street https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/35134787 is displayed with solid line and blue, while in reality it is a cobblestone surface with egg-shaped, rounded nature stones that look like they've been there since Prussian times and is essentially unrideable for anything but a mountain bike with suspension; it is accordingly tagged with `unhewn_cobblestone` in Berlin's OSM lingo.
Is this change to the rendering of `sett` surfaces (and maybe `unhewn_cobblestone`, but I cannot recall had that ever been rendered differently before) intentional or a software regression? I am of course very much aware that a global renderer will never be able to take into account all local specialties (including local OSM tagging flavours; I wouldn't even be able to speak for Germany at large, as I only know the OSM tagging practice in the Berlin/Brandenburg region), but could you maybe take a look whether this is an intended change or an accidental side effect of other updates?
Thank you very much, and please let me know if I can assist in resolving :)
Best,
// Sebastian
Comments
That’s a really interesting question!
The short answer is yes, cycle.travel has (fairly recently) started differentiating between surface=cobblestone and surface=sett, with a better weighting for the latter. It doesn’t know about surface=unhewn_cobblestone, but probably it should.
So if the Berlin cobbles are largely unrideable but are tagged as sett… that’s a problem. I’ll look again at the weightings – it might be necessary to have regional differences (which cycle.travel already does for quite a few tags) but maybe just I’ve cranked up the weighting too much for surface=sett. I’ll have a play around and see what works best. Thanks for spotting!