[Tagging] sidewalks

[Nathan Edgars II]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 3:40 AM, Simone Saviolo
<simone.saviolo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/8/26 David ``Smith'' <vidthekid at gmail.com>:
>> * If a street has its sidewalks mapped separately, the street itself
>> should probably be tagged with foot=no.
>
> -1. "no" is too strong: pedestrians are never forbidden to go on a
> road (except for motorways, at least in Italy). Maybe something like
> "not preferred", only with a better wording that I can't come up with
> right now :-) ? Of course a router for the blind should do its best to
> avoid such a way, while a regular pedestrian router could penalize the
> way but route on it if needed.

One would think that a router would be able to prefer a parallel
footway without a special tag. One real problem with routing along
sidewalks is that they sometimes don't have curb cuts at
intersections, yet it's legal to cross there. Example:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=28.457321,-81.45624&spn=0.000993,0.002575&t=k&z=20&layer=c&cbll=28.457407,-81.45623&panoid=W8rLGRkFUgFWzRRpWLSWCg&cbp=12,59.26,,0,10.44
To route correctly here, you'd either have to draw an incorrect
footway, or the router would need to be able to "jump" a gap if
there's no barrier (and you don't tell it you're in a wheelchair).