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<p>Paths and ways along a road can be mapped separately in OSM, but
those separate geometries cannot be identified as part of the
road, or only with the significant effort of using geometric
processing (which most applications can't perform). However, the
information whether a path is attendant to a road or not is
important for many use cases and can offer various advantages.<br>
<br>
Therefore, a sidepath concept using the tag "is_sidepath" as an
additional tag on ways (in particular cycle ways or foot paths) is
proposed to indicate whether a way is related/attendant to a road
(i.e. adjacent and parallel to a road) or whether it runs
independently/isolated without any relationship to a road.
Furthermore, an extended set of sub-tags is proposed to allow to
explicitly tag important road attributes on the sidepath itself.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Key:is_sidepath">https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Key:is_sidepath</a><br>
<br>
You can discuss this proposal on its Wiki Talk page or here.</p>
<p>Best, Alex<br>
</p>
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