[OSM-talk-be] Path vs Footpath (sorry for opening the pandora box)

Thu Feb 18 11:34:09 UTC 2021

Hi Matthieu,

Welcome in the swampy fields of tagging discussions ;)

*My view*

First of all, we do professional routeplanning, for both cyclists and 
pedestrians. And yes, I do (mostly) agree with your view: a path is a 
small, unpaved (desire) path, e.g. through a forest whereas a footway is 
IMHO a typical paved (or planned) road of at least 0.5m wide. A rule of 
thumb that I use is that a wheelchair/stroller could pass easily, or as 
Gerard said earlier: "it is like a sidewalk, but just not next to a road"

If the "footway" is sufficiently wide that a car /could/ drive over it 
(but is not allowed to), I'm inclined to mark them as 
/highway=pedestrian/. This is useful information, as e.g. emergency 
services might take it during an intervention to get close to the 
location of the accident.

I'm also inclined to mark a wide, planned way (e.g. in parks) as 
footways too.

I try to base my road classification mostly on physical aspects: a path 
stays a path, even if it suddenly has a name board. This is because of 
my view from routeplanning: in general, I assume that that a footway is 
accessible to a wheelchair user, whereas a path is not. To explicitly 
add the vicinal road status, there are some tags for that 
(vicinal_road:ref IIRC?). This is the only place where I disagree with you:

 > The only exception I see is a path in the country side that is 
explicitly marked (road signs) as pedestrian only, and/or has turnstiles 
or other gates to keep other users away.

I would still mark those as a `highway=path`, with an additional 
`bicycle=no` and map the turnstiles/kissing gates explicitly. The data 
consumer can then decide what to do.

Note however that not everyone agrees with my vision and that I'm not 
always consistent too - I mapped a very peculiar case 
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/107877794> yesterday that by my 
objective criteria should be a 'path', but that I mapped as footways due 
to their context as that felt more appropriate - butthat place 
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/126568080> has given me more tagging 
questions too...

At last, some people say that "a footway needs a traffic sign to be a 
footway" or "a cycle path needs a traffic sign to be a cyclepath". That 
is a view I vehemently reject - not every qualitive footway has a 
traffic sign nor has every traffic sign a qualitative footway - although 
a traffic sign can help in making these decisions.

Also abusing `highway=path` for shared infrastructure cycle/pedestrian 
infrastructure is something I loathe: it erases a lot of information and 
is an effective downgrade of the relevant ways from a routeplanning 
perspective, as we have to assume the way is a desire path (small, 
unpaved); not accessible to e.g. wheelchairs, strollers and rollerskate, 
instead of the very accessible nicely paved, wide footway. To be able to 
replicate all the information for this downgrade, we would need 
`surface=*`, `width=*`, `smoothness=*` and maybe even `wheelchair=*` to 
be sure it is a highly qualitative footway and quite a bit of tricky and 
inexact preprocessing. However, I do not have a perfect solution for the 
shared footways/cycleways as well - but marking as path is definitively 
worse.
So, Marc_marc: I'm sorry, but I do not agree with you and some of the 
wiki definitions! But that is fine - a disagreement is often due to a 
different perspective or some missing information. And OSM won't fail 
over a bit of disagreement ;)

*Some history*

Apart from my vision, it is also important to know that OpenStreetMap 
started in the UK, where there are plenty of vicinal roads. I think 
those where historically mapped as highway=footway too, but I'm not sure 
of that. Furthermore, as Gerard nicely stated earlier, it is a common 
translation error.

Furhtermore, the iD editor used to "upgrade" tags: a `highway=footway + 
bicycle=yes` and `highway=cycleway + foot=yes` got upgraded to 
`highway=path; bicycle=yes; foot=yes`.  As the iD editor is widely used, 
there are quite some footways downgraded now...

Kind regards,
Pieter

On 18.02.21 10:27, Matthieu Gaillet wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to know if there is some kind of consensus in Belgium 
> regarding the use of <footway> and <path> tags.
>
> My intuitive interpretation in the following :
>
>   * a footway, generally speaking, is anything that is specifically
>     created for pedestrians in urbanised areas.
>   * a path, is generally speaking anything that is not a track (thus
>     not for 4 wheeled vehicles) and not (as well) paved like a footway.
>
> I know there are other much more loose interpretations that say that a 
> footway might be a non-paved path, but my question is : why would one 
> tag them differently than others ? After all, a path is not suitable 
> for anything else than pedestrian use (except sometimes bikes) ? On 
> the contrary, footways in urbanised places *are* special and it makes 
> sense to map them differently.
>
> I observe that some mappers are using the footway tags for paths in 
> forests or fields in the middle of nowhere. Those are often “sentiers 
> communaux” (public paths) mapped by balnam affiliates.  Its driving me 
> nuts 😊
> - most of the time this difference in the way those paths are mapped 
> doesn’t reflect any physical nor practical reality on the field.
> - this creates vagueness and looseness, I see “normal” paths suddenly 
> showed as “special” on maps without any clear reason.
> - some could argument that the path tag is not detailed enough. That’s 
> not true : it can be (and is) combined with a lot of other tags to 
> qualify it from multiple point of views and renderers are already 
> taking care of them. This is *not* the case of the footway which is 
> (logically) kind of monolithic.
>
> The only exception I see is a path in the country side that is 
> explicitly marked (road signs) as pedestrian only, and/or has 
> turnstiles or other gates to keep other users away.
>
> Do you generally agree with my way of seeing things ? Is it at least 
> the general way of doing things in Belgium ? Thanks for sharing your 
> thoughts.
>
>
> Matthieu
>
>
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-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Pieter Vander Vennet

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