[Talk-is] Footpath and cycleways...

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Christoph Hess
<christoph at hess-familie.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> first time I write on this mailing list. I did some mapping and editing
> especially around háaleitis.
>
> I found in the mailing list in november archive something about this
> problems with footpaths etc. It was the same at háaleitisbraut. There
> were some cycleways which were indeed just pathwalks beside the street.
> I think there are a lot of left overs in this manner...

I suppose you mean this:

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-is/2008-November/000034.html

There's also some talk on the wiki at:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Talk:WikiProject_Iceland/Cycleways

> I was looking around some other bigger cities in Germany (where i lived
> and areas i know with different settings like pathways, pavewalks etc.
> and they are not so strange and complicated even if there are a lot of
> different kinds on one road (like two lanes, in the middle two tram
> railways, and sidewalk separated into foot and bicycle lane).
>
> And i found some information in the OSM wiki how to use cycleways,
> footways and paths. We should use paths whereever possible and add
> bicycle or foot set on yes. Cycleways can be used when they are
> explicitly marked as a cycleway (i think there are really few in
> reykjavík imho even this paths besides miklabraut are not really marked
> as explicit cycleways - so we should use the path tag and
> foot+bicycle=yes).
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Path/Examples

You are right, highway=path with access restrictions would be more
correct according to this proposed feature on the wiki. However in
practice the tools that actually use the data (renderers, osm->GPS
exporters, routing applications) almost exclusively only look at the
primary highway tag, i.e. whether something is a footway, cycleway,
path, residential etc.

See e.g.:

http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=64.13057&lon=-21.88755&zoom=16&layers=B000FTF

And the cyclemap renders cycleways prominently while completely
ignoring highway=path:

http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=64.1295&lon=-21.8819&zoom=14&layers=00B0FTF

The same goes for the cyclemap I create for garmin devices, the
stylesheet I use renders highway=cycleway very prominently:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Garmin_map_of_Iceland

My *only* interest in tagging conventions for the areas I edit has
been to make them consistent, so that homogeneous objects share the
same tags -- thus we can in the future mass-change them to any tagging
scheme that fits us without loss of information, *and* to tag them in
such a way that our maps are as useful as possible today for the
widest possible audience.

For the latter reason I don't think we should change the
highway=cycleways around the capital area to higway=path with
appropriate access restriction. Even though it would mean the exact
same thing as far as the raw map data is concerned it wouldn't as far
as renderings of it go.

Any sane map rendering should include the cycle/footways such as those
around Miklabraut more prominently than inner-suburb paths such as the
ones in Háaleiti, but if we tagged everything as highway=path
everything from a pavement to wide paved cycleways such as the ones in
Grafarvogur would look exactly the same on the map.

> I think we don't need to include every way separate if it is separated
> from the street by a small grass lane. This would be completely
> confusing. There are discussions about using a tag for streets with the
> possibility to add tags for pavewalks right/left/both and bicycle and
> foot yes/no - maybe this will be a good solution: in the future...
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Sidewalk

I think I made my opinion at least pretty clear in my November post to
the mailing list on the matter. I think if there's a feature on the
ground we should map it and add it to the database. Adding a tag to
the way saying there's a pavement on the left or right doesn't carry
the same information as mapping out the pavement itself, it doesn't
allow you to specify where a crossing occurs, how far the pavement is
from it and where other footways intersect with that pavement.

I don't see how mapping a different kind of way closely to another way
is going to be confusing, it's not ambiguous in the database if tagged
correctly, and if someone doesn't want to see or render it it's very
easy to filter it out before using the data.

Anyway, happy mapping. And don't take what I've said as some sort of
decree on the matter, it's just what I think makes sense at the time
given the current situation, cycle of the moon and other
semi-arbitrary things :)