For many years it has bugged me that no maps display whether a road is a toll road, whether cycling is forbidden there and whether its surface is made of cobblestone. For driving, avoiding toll roads can save a lot of money in many places, but sometimes taking a small section of toll road can save a lot of fuel and time. For cycling, in some especially bicycle-hostile countries (for example Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium), cycling is forbidden on the majority of main roads, and the alternatives are often in a very bad state. In East Germany in particular, many small roads and streets are paved with cobblestones, which makes cycling slow and uncomfortable and can cause damage to the body, bicycle and luggage.

While route calculation services offer to avoid these types of roads to some extent, rendering them on a map is important to get a general overview of different options, and in case of cycling because route calculation generally works badly, as personal preferences and cycling styles vary greatly and the infrastructure is full of limitations that cannot be accurately represented on OpenStreetMap.

After a long time of digging into the creation of OpenStreetMap tiles, I have finally managed to create my own overlay tiles to display these road properties on any map.

So far my impression is that most of the data is pretty accurate, in particular the data about toll roads, but bicycle=use_sidepath is very largely underused, so most roads where cycling is forbidden due to a compulsory bikepath are not mapped as such yet.

The tiles are hosted on https://tiles.facilmap.org/ and are available as Map styles on FacilMap. On FacilMap there is also a legend that explains the meaning of the different colours.

Feel free to use the tiles in your own projects, for now there are no limitations. When using the tiles in a commercial or heavy-use project, consider a monthly donation to cover the server costs.

The source code and map styles can be found on GitHub. If you have any suggestions for improvements, open an issue there or comment on this diary entry.