bicycle=designated

If that's the case, here's another complication 😱

I've looked at over a dozen of the previously mapped, signed AND painted/separated bike lanes/tracks in the area, and they are all set to bicycle=yes. None are bicycle=designated.

What potential issues would come up if I'm only assigning this one bit of road as bicycle=designated. Like, will it look different on the cycleOSM layer, or will it cause differences in bike navigation routing?

Does this mean exclusively for bikes? Because it sounded from OP like this is not the case.

I think it comes down to accuracy, which is what when adding any content to OSM.

Cycle Routes may have different meaning depending on the location. My municipality seems to mark roads that link to cycling infrastructure as cycling routes, even if they aren't part of the cycling network (which are considerably more vast and usually expand across multiple municipalities, provinces, or even the country. I think to use "cycle route" for this specific example isn't accurate.

"bicycle=designated" has been all over the place from examples I've been looking at spanning 100km in either direction. Some mappers seem to only use the "designated" tag on bike paths, while others use them on roads with simple bike lanes. But there's a lack of consistency, so it's hard to know who's right in these situations.

For me, it makes a lot more sense to use the "designated" tag here, instead of "bicycle=yes" (which applies to 99% of the roads here), or the cycle route tag.

At the end of the day, I think most (i.e. non-mappers) are interested in how the data actually works for them. For example, can they see this cycling infrastructure on their bike computer, or does it still appear as a regular road because the tags aren't specific enough? To me, that would be more problematic than a "somewhat accurate" tag. But that's my opinion.