[Tagging] Deprecation - waterway=riverbank vs water=river

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

I think it is important to point out that, despite the name, the
waterway=riverbank tag isn't used to tag river banks.  This is one of
the fundamental misunderstandings that this nomenclature causes.  It's
used to tag *river areas* -- in other words, the area of the river
covered by water.  There is currently no tag in use to tag actual
riverbanks (as in just the edges of a river, and not the water in
between), other than to infer it from the edges of tagged river areas.
waterway=riverbank is an exact synonym of natural=water + water=river.
Both are used to tag river areas.

If you are using waterway=riverbank to tag river banks, rather than
river areas, you will quite rightly get an error in JOSM noting that
an area style is used on an unclosed way.

On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 9:08 PM Michael Patrick <geodesy99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There are certainly instances, legally defined, where either tag might be useful. In the State of Montana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Stream_Access_Law , for instance, areas between the ordinary high water mark ( not to be confused with the 'flood plain'  https://s3.amazonaws.com/visit-big-sky/craft/pdfs/Stream-Side-Access-MT.pdf?mtime=20181114055056  ) are public access, and growing up in that area, what we colloquially called the 'bank' was certainly not necessarily the edge of the water itself, since that changed from day to day and certainly seasonally, even if not in flood stage. And Montana isn't the only state with some version of this, and Oregon has similar laws regarding vehicle access on coastal beaches.
> " Ordinary high-water mark means the line that water impresses on land by covering it for sufficient time to cause different characteristics below the line, such as deprivation of the soil of substantially all its terrestrial vegetation and destruction of its value for agricultural vegetation. Flood plains next to streams are considered to be above the ordinary high-water mark, and are not open for recreation without permission"
>
> From " Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Perspective, Access to Public Lands Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Perspective" at https://player.slideplayer.com/88/15893622/slides/slide_10.jpg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Stream_Access_Law#/media/File:CampingJeffersonRiverOct2008.JPG and https://s3.amazonaws.com/visit-big-sky/craft/pdfs/Stream-Side-Access-MT.pdf?mtime=20181114055056
>
> ( and, at least in the USA, these banks are 'mappable' from public data, I am currently doing that along the Little Missouri http://bit.ly/2NpgLHi , and this geomorphology is common along the Eastern front ranges of the mountains in North America from the arctic circle into Mexico ).
>
> Michael Patrick
>>
>>
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