Assessing the Completeness of Bicycle Trail and Designated Lane Features in OpenStreetMap for the United States and Europe

The analysis in this study reveals a steady growth of cycling related data in the OpenStreetMap platform over the past few years, rendering the data more complete and appropriate to be used as base map for planning studies on non-motorized transportation.

Abstract

This paper assesses the completeness of OpenStreetMap data for cycling features, in particular bicycle trails and designated lanes, for selected cities in the United States and Europe. While most available comprehensive road network datasets, either from commercial data vendors or public agencies, are tailored towards motorized traffic, OpenStreetMap as a community based, open access platform for geospatial vector data provides a viable alternative for data retrieval of cycling feature data. The analysis in this study reveals a steady growth of cycling related data in the OpenStreetMap platform over the past few years, rendering the data more complete and appropriate to be used as base map for planning studies on non-motorized transportation. A comparison with the Google Maps Bicycling layer shows that the data quality of OpenStreetMap designated lanes is particularly high. OpenStreetMap bicycle trail data are somewhat more erroneous through missing data and incorrectly classified trails, however still of relatively good quality. For practical purposes it is recommended to check OpenStreetMap trail data against the Google Maps Bicycling layer before an analysis is conducted based on OpenStreetMap trail data.