Hi,
Ah, interesting, I hadn't heard about the project and hadn't been that far west in the city in a few months. The highway=cycleway ways were added by a new mapper and suspiciously was drawn exactly on top of the painted lanes, and I erred on the side of caution. There really wasn't much history to delete since it was created the day before (besides the one older way that got picked up by my editor's splitter).

The places where there has been long-standing physical separation are already tagged with cycleway=track. For such short stretches, it makes far more sense to use that tag than an independent highway=cycleway way like is used for the Commercial Street cycle track.

Once the project is finished, we absolutely should model the new protection with highway=cycleway ways or the cycleway=track tag (though it'd be hard to use highway=cycleway ways without aerial imagery).