[Talk-GB] Advice on footpaths - when should they be separate, when not?

[David Woolley]

On 01/12/14 11:39, Stuart Reynolds wrote:

> road, which is Sherwood Drive. There is also a footpath shown coming
> from the station and along the eastern side of Sherwood Drive, but not
> on the western side.

I think it can be difficult to justify undoing micro-mappings, like 
this, even though they clutter the standard rendering and can be 
confusing. That's because they generally do add real information.

>
> This feels very wrong to me on a number of levels. For starters, the
> footpath doesn’t connect to Sherwood Drive except at the bottom, so it
> isn’t apparent that you can cross the road to go along Selwyn Grove, for

I think this is a special case of a general problem with pedestrian 
routing that, in the absence of barriers, there can be an infinity of 
potential crossover points, not just between explicit sidewalks, but 
also between roads and adjacent fields or pedestrian squares.  I haven't 
seen the adjacent tag before, but I don't think just yes or no would be 
enough.

> example. Also, there is no footpath going north, nor is there a footpath
> on the western side of Sherwood Drive, despite it being quite clearly
> there on Streetview. In addition, Sherwood Drive already has the tag

OS StreetView suppresses all footpaths!  Google Streetview is inadmissible.

Micro-mapping has to stop somewhere, and, if the sidewalk on the other 
side is straightforward, it might be the best place to stop.

> Sidewalk=both which rather makes the footpath redundant, doesn’t it?

sidewalk=both is wrong, but that should be fixed by correcting the 
sidewalk tag.