[Tagging] Meaning of access=yes on highway=footway?

[Florian Lohoff]

Hi Raphael,

On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 06:47:27PM +0200, Raphael wrote:
> > But isnt it that we dont put any physical apperance into
> > our highway=* tagging?  We tag what a way is used for, and probably
> > legal to be used for. Physical appearance shows up in lanes, surface,
> > smoothness, sidewalk, cycleway, lit, shoulder and the like.
> 
> Isn't the difference between highway=footway and highway=pedestrian
> its width, that is a physical property? I thought that highway=footway
> is too narrow for most double-tracked motor vehicles.

Be careful. The OSM highway=* tagging is NOT about physical properties.
Its about usage, de facto or legal.

highway=footway does not make any hard assumptions about its physical
dimensions. It is said that a typical footway will be to narrow to
host 2 track vehicles, but there are exceptions.

So when talking about physical attributes one should use width, height, 
surface, lanes etc.

So a highway=footway is a way which is typically used by pedestrians
and forbidden for mostly everything else. So you have an implicit
vehicle=no.


The difference for footway/pedestrian is that pedestrian (areas)
are used in shopping areas, town centres. Besides that they are
by default the same access tag wise:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_tags_for_routing/Access_restrictions#Germany

Flo
-- 
Florian Lohoff                                                     f at zz.de
  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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