[Talk-GB] Footway to Sidewalk?

Robert Scott lists at humanleg.org.uk
Tue Aug 21 16:42:47 BST 2012


On Tuesday 21 August 2012, Adam Hoyle wrote:
> I agree - from the wiki http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dfootway a footway seems unambiguously to be what americans call a sidewalk.

The way I see it, a sidewalk has to be on the "side" of something. The majority of footways mapped in urban areas are generally cut-throughs that create routes not available via the other roads.

In fact, I'm one that advocates that "sidewalks" are the exact definition of what should _not_ be mapped using separate highway=footway ways as it causes all kinds of mess and routing brokenness. So part of me thinks it's a good thing to have a separate noun and concept for these. But then again, when designing schemes it's usually a helpful idea to re-use vocabulary in self-similar ways. And footway=left does _kind of_ mirror the way the highway=footway footway=blah works using the familiar foo=bar bar=baz pattern.

Oh man this is why I don't join the tagging list.

> It's totally confused me, so in the bit of UK countryside I edit I have added tons of ways with highway=footway tags through woods, fields etc, when in fact I am pretty sure they should really be highway=path tags. I realised this a little while ago, so this thread is timely.
> 
> Do please correct me if I'm still confused as I'm slowly going through the process of re-tagging them from footway to path.

Well, highway=path is supposed to be the more general form of highway=cycleway|footway|... and tends to crop up more in the countryside as paths don't tend to be so strictly differentiated.

Anyway, agreed the bulk edit is dumb.


robert.



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