How OpenStreetMap became the backbone of France's National Cycling Database

Room: Corse

Saturday, 16:45
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)

Language: en

Base Nationale des Aménagements Cyclables

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  • Samuel Deschamps-Berger

In the wake of the French "Loi d’Orientation des Mobilités" (LOM), local authorities faced a major challenge: how to produce and share standardized, high-quality data on cycling infrastructure? This presentation explores the success story of the Base Nationale des Aménagements Cyclables (BNAC), a national standard born from the collaboration between Geovelo, Carto’Cité, the French government and local authority, and the OpenStreetMap community. For over two decades, Carto’Cité and Geovelo have been using OpenStreetMap as their core engine. When the need for a national database emerged, instead of creating a closed silo, the partners chose to leverage OSM’s flexibility. We will detail our methodology, aiming to replicate such a success :

  • Data Enrichment: How we transform raw OSM tags into a schema compliant with national requirements.
  • The Feedback Loop: How we help local authorities to contribute back to OSM, ensuring a "single source of truth" that benefits everyone – from GPS users to urban planners.
  • Success Metrics: A look at the results with over 110,000 km of cycling paths harmonized and available for everybody.

This session will demonstrate how private players, rooted in the community and the OSM environment, can act as technical catalysts to turn OSM data into a government standard, providing a replicable model for other countries aiming for Cycling Data Sovereignty.