[Tagging] ladders

[Anne-Karoline Distel]

Hello all,

in my endeavour to improve the mapping and tagging along waterways, I
noticed that there is no approved or documented tag for ladders along
shorelines. There is ladder=yes
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ladder), but it seems to be
meant for hiking paths and is only rendered on lines. I mapped a few
ladder=yes along river shores on OSMAnd, only to discover that I need to
add the quay wall to have them rendered which is a lot of extra effort,
and cannot be done casually using OSMAnd.

After talking to someone who canoes, they tell me that many of the ones
I had mapped along the retaining wall in the town where I live are
actually for emergencies, when people fall into the river. They're not
meant to be used by swimmers, i.e. they're not actually accessible from
the shore with a gate in the fence. Then I'm thinking, should it be
emergency=ladder? But what if one isn't sure if they are for boating
people or only for emergency situations? So I'm now mapping them as
man_made=ladder (and add ladder=yes, so they get rendered), as other
people have done in harbour or river situations before me, but only very
infrequently.

30 are mapped as ladder for scuba diving
(https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/scuba_diving%3Aentry%3Aladder#overview),
but the average person might not know, if there is no signage. I think a
simpler way would be to just use man_made=ladder and add the sport or
the emergency tag to the best of ones knowledge.

Anne
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