[Talk-GB] Shoulders

[Andy Townsend]

On 15/04/2022 10:39, Mark Goodge wrote:
>
>
> On 15/04/2022 08:16, Philip Barnes wrote:
>> On Wed, 2022-04-13 at 19:37 +0100, Tom Crocker wrote:
>>> It asks:
>>> Does this road have a shoulder?
>>> A shoulder is a clearly demarcated emergency stopping lane that
>>> allows vehicles to stop safely completely beside the traffic lane,
>>> although not always (fully) on paved surface.
>>
>> In UK terms I would disagree with the final part, about not always a
>> paved surface.
>>
>> An important part of the function of a hard shoulder is that vehicles
>> can slow dow outside the running lanes and when leaving can accellerate
>> to a safe speed to safely rejoin the live lanes. Here you will be
>> joining the live lanes at little over walking pace.
>
> Surely that's the point, though? There's a difference between a 
> shoulder and a hard shoulder. Or, to be more precise, a hard shoulder 
> is a subset of shoulder. So the question is, are we mapping all 
> shoulders, or only hard shoulders?
>
> Having said that, I don't think the example you gave in your original 
> post is a shoulder, hard or otherwise. A shoulder isn't just a 
> slightly wider carriageway than is necessary for the marked lanes. A 
> verge isn't a shoulder, particularly when, as in this case, it's 
> interrupted by marker posts and separated from the carriageway by 
> drainage gravel.
>
> https://goo.gl/maps/s9grKsPQm8rRPWiy7
>
> In the UK, though, we generally don't have non-hard shoulders. So, for 
> the most part, I think it's fair to say that they should only be 
> mapped in the UK when fully paved, unless it's obvious that an unpaved 
> off-carriageway lane is intended for use as a shoulder.
>
>
I suspect that part of the problem here is that what people around the 
world call a "shoulder" varies, and in some cases it varies within a 
country (for example, there's been discussion among people from the USA 
about this elsewhere).

To be fair to StreetComplete, I think that their description is a good 
summary of what I'd describe as a shoulder - I'd definitely consider a 
hard gravelly section wide enough for a vehicle to the nearside of a 
road as a "shoulder". They're pretty rare in England Wales and Scotland 
(not sure about Northern Ireland, although the Republic has lots of 
them).  Arguably enabling this quest on anywhere other than motorways in 
England is a bad idea as it may create a significant number of false 
positives among the true negatives**, and (as a passenger, obviously) 
StreetComplete on motorways is something of a challenge.

Thanks for mentioning verges. <climbs soapbox> As someone who fairly 
regularly walks along rural roads it's really useful to know which roads 
have usable verges.  They're no use to cyclists though, and I suspect 
that the small gaps between the painted edge of the carriageway on some 
"expressway-style" UK roads are.  How should those be tagged?  Some of 
the Americans mentioned earlier would call that a "narrow shoulder"; I 
probably wouldn't - but what is it?

Best Regards,

Andy

** hopefully the unpleasantness of the last couple of years has got more 
people up to speed with this element of basic statistics(!)