Participate in OSM – Tagging Guidelines

The VeloMap is based on http://openstreetmap.org . This means that you can and should help to improve the maps. You can think of openmtbmap as an equivalent to Wikipedia – but not as a general encyclopedia, but one for map data. Instead of writing on how you can work on the maps myself – I will include links to the most important wiki pages on If you don't know what Openstreetmap is about – you can read up on it here: wiki.openstreetmap.org

If you wan't to help improve the maps please read through the introduction here: Beginners_Guide Note that point 5 of the Beginneers_Guide is done here on openmtmap.org for you. So you can improve the map by gathering data with your GPS, then uploading the GPX tracks, and then editing the openstreetmap data with JOSM or Potlatch. There is also a good overview here on the map_making_overview.

Important tags in OSM for the Velomap – or what should I map?

However to enable good autorouting there are some more tags not listed on this page that you should add:

• You should use at least one of the following tags for pathes and tracks: Tracktype or Smoothness
• Adding Surface is never bad, but for routing tracktype or smoothness would be enough: Surface
• Also keys like sac_scale, mtb:scale, mtb:scale:uphill, trail_visibility and usability are evaluated. They will however only be used if none of the above is present.
• In cities it is imortant to tag traffic_signals and a bit less important to tag Stop signs.
• To make the routing understand that a road is really big, tag appropriate number of lanes. A primary road which is tagged Oneway=yes  & Lanes=2 can be considered to be not very nice for cycling.
• Also if a road is part of the E-Road-Network and has  International_Reference set this is important to tag (so it can be avoided).
• Of course both cycle routes and mtb routes (if the mtb route is on a paved road) can be valuable information and it is assumed that the way should be preferred.
• Also cycleway=lane, cycleway:left=lane, cycleway:left=opposite_lane and all keys found here are of course used for autorouting and rendered on the map: Bicycle
• I encourage to stopp the fuss about pathes, footways and cyclways by using the Designation
• Very important for assessing whether a road is inside a city, or outside is to use source:maxspeed. Using this I can promote tertiary and secondary streets outside of cities, but degarde those high traffic inner city connector roads.

Soon and most importantly if you get bad routing even though the above keys are used, I will implement: Class:bicycle which you can use to promote or degrade any way. Just like car drivers know that based on street classification a primary is usually faster to drive than a tertiary street, with class:bicycle you can specify importance for cycling. Because it is simply impossible to tag everything objectively. So if the most popular tags and the ones above are already tagged, but the route is using suboptimal ways, use class:bicycle to specify the priority a road should have for cycling. For this map I will evaluate class:bicycle, class:bicycle:commute, class:bicycle:touring and most importantly class:bicycle:roadcycling