[Tagging] When does highway=footway become highway=pedestrian?

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 05:20 2021-11-01, Martin Koppenhoefer đã viết:
>> On 1 Nov 2021, at 02:56, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
>>
>> The distinction between a pedestrian plaza and an ordinary footway is a bit fuzzy. In some places I'm familiar with, pedestrian plazas have distinct names and fill in gaps in the street grid, rather than being associated with other streets, so that's a good rule of thumb locally.
> 
> 
> squares, of which pedestrian plazas are a subtype, can be mapped as place=square, so the distinction whether a pedestrian area is also a square, or part of a square, can be unambiguously answered, if the squares are mapped. On the other hand, parts of squares often aren’t pedestrian accessible, or intended to be accessible, e.g. flowerbeds, fountains, sculptures, lawn and roads. place=square was introduced to overcome the limitations of using highway=pedestrian for it

The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, since they're used in 
different manners. But anyways, I was trying rather clumsily to remark 
on the broader class of paved area that could represent a square or a 
pedestrian _mall_, all of which would be candidates for highway=pedestrian.

Consider the Paseo de San Antonio in downtown San Jose, California. [1] 
There is a square, but there's also a pedestrian mall discernible by the 
darker paving stones. The mall is wide enough that we can reasonably 
describe a pedestrian going laterally along the mall, yet there's also 
an obvious linear progression along the mall. place=square, 
highway=pedestrian, and area:highway=pedestrian could all reasonably be 
used around here.

[1] https://osm.org/go/TZMjSk_ss?m=

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us