Like you I’m unsure and never considered designed as signed. The name is designed by… design. signed=yes has nothing to do with that.
Designed mean designed with those users in mind.
Eh, manche sagen, nur die blauen Schilder erfüllen das, die Absicht dass etwas für etwas Verwendung findet, manche sagen,
And in France, blue signs can be round (compulsatory usage) or square (compulsatory usage too, but they are the only users allowed there).
B22a : cyclists have to use this way.
B22b : pedestrians have to use this way.
B22a+B22b, shared by pedestrians and cyclists, mandatory usage also. separated or not is usually painted horizontally (more or less sparesly).
Here, pedestrians, cyclists have to use their own ways (signed with C109 and C113 respectively). Using another way (a.o. the main road) is not legal.
Here, no sign, good sense is sufficient! I would say designed for cyclists and pedestrians.
C115 is probably what you mean by “green” signs.
Voies vertes = green ways. Mostly reusing former railways here. No mandatory usage, but usually standing alone, so if you can, you use it. If along a high traffic road, you will use it, See FR:Bicycle#Voies_vertes for details.
Note: numbers are for France only.
Note : designed does not mean well designed…
Language notice: in English, verbs designate and design have different (but related) meanings:
designate: to appoint something or someone to a specific purpose by law. For example, “he was designated as a minister”. Here, we’re talking of highways that have been assigned to pedestrians or cyclists by law.
design: to make plans and drawings to create something.
For example, a typical cycleway is first designed, then built, and upon opening finally designated for use by cyclists. However, we also have designated cycleways which were originally designed as railways.
I wrote designed as I meant designed. If I had wanted to use designated, I would have said designated. Sorry, I don’t see your point.
I mean that the intention was to build an infrastructure for cyclists (or pedestrians) but that it doesn’t meant that the result is not necessary an infrastructure suitable for cyclists (or pedestrians).
Nederland has the same sign, mandatory cycleway. Access for bicycle is designated iow bicycle=designated is implicit. We don’t have bicycle=mandatory.
Most of the time these mandatory cycleways accompany a road. We tag bicycle=use_sidepath on the road next to it; this adds the “mandatory” information of the cycleway access.
The text of the proposal where this language was introduced is not helpful at all (No wonder, it was the path proposal.) I guess there were Germans at work too, for them the native term “gewidmet” might be translated as designated or designed at will.
I guess there were Germans at work too, for them the native term “gewidmet” might be translated as designated or designed at will.
yes, it was a German to introduce the “designated” value, I think the translation of “gewidmet” in this context could better have been “dedicated” (designated could also work I think although it seems less common in this meaning, but mappers are used to it by now), while “designed” could be translated as “entworfen”/“projektiert” but not as “gewidmet”.
Well not really. While meaning of dedicated and designated indeed overlaps, they have different connotations, since “dedicate” is chiefly emotional and “designate” legal. For example, a new cycleway may be designated to use by cyclists, but dedicated to (and named after) e.g. Greg Lemond (example).
For me that’s a different meaning of “dedicated”. (Yes, English is fun). I think the more general meaning of dedicated is “set aside for…”, “assigned to…”, “exclusively reserved for or focused on. …”.
Attached is a screenshot from an Irish news site. You can see both meanings of “dedicated” in the headlines. The ones about Tiktok, uninsured drivers, and disinformation clearly have a sense of “exclusively focused on”.
So does designated mean something different from that dedicated, used in that sense? Probably, but I don’t feel 50+ years of speaking English qualifies me to attempt to pin that down.
(Outside of a specific legal context, that is - I know designated can have a definite legal meaning in some places - although I don’t recall any such use in (the Republic of) Ireland).
Yes, there has been a lot of confusion over the years about designated meaning only, especially where an “only” tag would be much more intuitive to a layperson than an override, such as access=nohov=designated. This confusion extends to data consumers:
Certainly, that is true of all our sidewalks. They are dedicated and designed for pedestrians, they certainly also are designated for pedestrians, in the sense of “gewidmet”, but they are NOT designated in the sense of signed, dedication/designation can only be read from design - actually they MUST NOT be SIGNED, because when they are signed (“ausgeschildert”), they are not a sidewalk (Gehsteig) but become a footway (Gehweg) instead (Speaking of Austria, may be different in other places.)
I think designation is by law, and the law is linked to something you can see. A sign, a road/path design, a painted logo, a line, a curb, sometimes paving differences. If there is nothing on the ground, you can’t know the designation, but it’s not necessarily a traffic sign.
Of course, authorities design networks of designated cycleways, just to confuse OSM-mappers.
I cannot make much sense of that: I understand, there is some intent. We cannot map intent, so we fall back on something else, it’s called designation?
I can think of two “designations”: Signage and Design. I just dropped in to say, IMHO @trial is not so far off as has been insinuated here.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Not every fact about the world is explicitly signposted or codified in law. In some parts of the world, we identify concepts such as “sidewalk” and “driveway” based on intuition, sometimes in spite of the law. Other concepts such as “expressway” may appear in construction plans and press conferences.
That said, I wouldn’t have used the word “designated” in the context of that highway=path proposal. I think the intent of the proposal was to distinguish between the preferred uses of a path (however we determine that) and the uses that are merely tolerated. The authors didn’t foresee that UK mappers would popularize a very similar designation=* key the following year. This use of the term “designated” isn’t shocking, but it isn’t ideal in the context of everything else we’ve come up with in OSM.
This is a common problem with proposals from the early years of OSM. We can waste our energy parsing these proposals as if they’re constitutional texts written by linguists, or we can accept that OSM was a freewheeling project back then – everyone involved in designing the tagging language just wanted to get on with mapping.
The proposal was originally trying to distinguish between “not explicitly forbidden, and thus allowed” (yes) and “explicitly allowed” (designated). However, both interpretations (preferred use case, and explicit or not) could (and probably should) be mapped differently, and the question I’m asking myself is: do we really need a stronger yes than yes, if there is no general agreement on the actual meaning, or is it time to retire this wishy-washy definition?
That sums it up pretty nicely But the question of how to continue with this tag remains: do we want to all read different things into this tag, start standardizing it, or replacing it with different tags?
I can see why someone wants to interpret designated as only, but it would be the same as just adding access=no. If someone started a proposal for access=only, my guess is, that it would be rejected for being the same as adding an implicit access=no.
I can also see why you would want to mark “this way is designed for X” / “the preferred usage of the way is by X”, but that is something that I would not expect to see in access control related tags. Again: if someone started a proposal for access=preferred, it wouldn’t go through, even if it was only, because it’s not related to access.
And finally, coming back to the thread’s original question, there’s also a reason for specifying “It’s a way for X, every other mode of transport is just a guest, and has to give priority to them”, which would be especially useful for crossings, or shared usage paths. Problems occur when there are more than 2 priorities (like a shared usage path for bikes and pedestrians, but also allowing residents access. This could lead to pedestrians having the “highest” priority, followed by cyclists, and the “poor” cars of the residents coming last). So the questions I’m raising are:
Is a single designated or priority or whatever enough to model all this, or would we need a completely different tag to model priority?
Are people reading too much into designated, and you don’t distinguish between yes and designated?
Rereading the proposal text, “designated as intended for a particular use”, I start to see why the fuzz about the round blue signs as a necessary prerequisite to tag “designated” on a footway that is so common in the German and Austrian community. Designation is not law, it is OTG truth that conveys intent.
I’d say this goes even farther: Some people understand designated as to mean mandatory. Another can of worms.
Back on topic: We here in Austria have ways that are designed for pedestrians, but cyclists not allowed - They are called Gehsteig (sidewalk/pavement). Here, the designation, a.k.a. OTG truth is in the construction.
Even back then, the dogma was in action: You must not tag what is not observable on the ground. They termed that designation. 19 out of 32 agreed (59%).
This was also before OSM really gained traction as a data source for routing services. Back then, it didn’t matter so much that access keys were getting skunked to convey tangential characteristics, like whether a highway=path is really a highway=cycleway in disguise, because access tagging was essentially for humans looking at the data and for renderers. If it weren’t for the simplistic project to consolidate multiple kinds of recreational paths into the highway=path tag, piggybacking on access keys instead of iterative refinement vía path=*, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion today.
B22a : cyclists have to use this way.
B22b : pedestrians have to use this way.
C109 and 
C113 respectively). Using another way (a.o. the main road) is not legal.
C115 is probably what you mean by “green” signs.
But the question of how to continue with this tag remains: do we want to all read different things into this tag, start standardizing it, or replacing it with different tags?