[Tagging] sidewalk unsuitable for wheelchair

[Tobias Knerr]

On 10.12.2017 19:25, Nick Bolten wrote:
> More or less, you describe sidewalks as `highway=footway`
> `footway=sidewalk`

Unfortunately, this breaks the semantic relationship between sidewalks
and the rest of the road ("this section of sidewalk belongs to that road
section"). Many applications do need that relationship, and it's pretty
much impossible to derive it automatically from separately mapped
sidewalk ways.

A great thing about OSM is that a mapper adding data will normally
benefit all users of that data, even if they themselves are only
motivated by one of the possible use cases. But that doesn't work if the
same tagging scheme that enables one use case blocks or breaks another.

> For example, you
> wouldn't have to make an executive decision about `sidewalk:width` vs
> `width:sidewalk` - just use the widely-documented `width` tag.

The format for sidewalk sub-tagging has already been documented in the
wiki, so it's not really a decision that needs to be made on an
individual basis:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sidewalk#Additional_tags

That section also already mentions wheelchair sub-tags which would solve
Volker's problem:

sidewalk:left:wheelchair = *
sidewalk:right:wheelchair = *
sidewalk:both:wheelchair = *