Kategoriarkiv: English

Bloggposter og sider skrevet på engelsk

Cycling in Norwegian Tunnels

Publisert av

Where I can find the map with norway tunnels where cyclists are not allowed to travel?

We strongly encourage you also to investigate other sources of information that are more tailored to the needs of cyclists, but we will of course do what we can with the tools we have. The Norwegian Public Road Administration (NPRA) are rather proud of our efforts toward an open government / open data policy.

The rerverse question is much easier to answer: In which tunnels is it legal to bicycle?  Tunnels registered in Norwegian Road data base should have the attribute sykkelforbud (=cycle restriction), with one of the two values Either Ja ( = sorry, no biking allowed) or Nei ( = No cycling restriction). Finding those tunnels is pretty straight forward in our web application vegkart:

Map screenshot from our web application Vegkart showing cycling is allowed along this part county road 50 in Aurland

Cycling in tunnels along this part county road 50 in Aurland is allowed.

There is one little snag: A tunnel in our road database is defined as a point object. What you and I think of as a tunnel — a man-made pipe caved through rock — is called tunnelløp. We define tunnels this way because a modern tunnel can be a very complicated high-tech construction with any number of pipes.

But what about finding the tunnels I can’t ride a bike in? Is that simply the reverse, i.e. sykkelforbud = Ja. 

Sykkelforbud = Ja (sorry, no biking here)

In a perfect world it would be that simple. But there are plenty of tunnels built long before anyone in the NPRA gave any thought to the idea that someone would actually want to ride a bike through a road tunnel. It is a fairly new concept that biking should be allowed in some tunnels, but not in others. So, we have plenty of tunnels where the property sykkelforbud is not defined. Can you legally ride a bike in those tunnels? Hard to say from my position at the keyboard. But here’s a map showing all combinations:

Sykkelforbud = Har ikke verdi (Undefined)
Sykkelforbud = Ja (explisitely forbidden) 
Sykkelforbud = Nei (Cycling allowed)
Biking restriction undefined (har ikke verdi), not allowed (sykkelforbud=Ja) and allowed (sykkelforbud=nei).

Biking restriction undefined (har ikke verdi), not allowed (sykkelforbud=Ja) and allowed (sykkelforbud=nei).

Link to this vegkart-query.

And yes, you may find this map a bit messy. Please bear in mind that our web application Vegkart is not made for tourists – it is a general tool to find and show any kind of road related object, developed for and by the NPRA.

One last note: Traffic signs take precedence over our road data base, so please respect any «No cycling» — sign.

No cycling allowed.

No cycling allowed.

No cycling or walking

No cycling or walking

A little note to oor our international fans

Publisert av

We (the Norwegian Road Administration) have received some intriguing questions about the API to the Norwegian Road Data Base. Unfortunately for Non-Norwegian programmers, all documentation is in Norwegian only. Hopefully, this very brief introduction may motivate you to learn a very beautiful language. (It aint that hard – even the children here speak it fluently). Or perhaps we some day should adapt to the other 99.93% of the population and provide documentation in English…

Update 2020: Use version 3 of NVDB api https://nvdbapiles-v3.atlas.vegvesen.no/dokumentasjon/

Update 2020: You may also enjoy this English summary: https://nvdbtransportportal.vegdata.no/

Virtually all data in the Norwegian Road Data (NVDB) base are available under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD), without carge.

If you want road data for navigational purposes you should have a look at the data we use in our own route planner (esri and spatialLite formats).

Besides the road network itself, the NVDB has of lots of data attached to the road network (think of those as anything road related found along the topological network). We have more than 300 different types of objects tied to the road network: Speed limits, toll station, traffic flow, traffic accidents, curvature, … the list goes on. Those objects are all defined in our data catalogue. (The official version is a java program, you’ll find a link to it here, most of you will probably prefer our unofficial web version). And (virtually) all of those data are available through our road database (NDRB) api.

The data structure in the NVDB API may seem a little complex at first, in particular if you expect everything to have a straightforward name – value data structure. Each object has a list of egenskaper  (properties, plural), containing any number of  the element egenskap (property, singular). Each egenskap (property) has an ID, a name (navn), a value (verdi) and a link to it’s own definition in the data catalogue.

To find what it actually costs to pass the station you’d search through the list of egenskaper  for the egenskap  with ID = 1820 and inspect that value (verdi). You’d probably expect the value to be in Norwegian Kroner, and you’d be right — which is confirmed by the tag enhet (unit).

And don’t forget the API’s twin companion Vegkart, which is a web application that shows data directly from our API. Seeing the objects location and probing their properties might be helpful to those unfamiliar with our API. Your successful Vegkart-query contains a download-link that takes you directly to NVDB api.

Toll station at Klett, south of Trondheim, Norway.

Toll station at Klett, south of Trondheim, Norway.

Any results from a successful Vegkart query can be downloaded (as csv or SOSI), but with some caveats.