[Talk-us] Sidewalks as footpaths

Andrew Guertin andrew.guertin at uvm.edu
Wed Apr 30 17:12:10 UTC 2014


On 04/30/2014 11:38 AM, William Morris wrote:
> Is there a general OSM policy on marking sidewalks as highway=footway?
> User dolphinling appears to have gone crazy in downtown Burlington,VT
> tracing the sidewalks and calling them footways. Which wouldn't be a
> problem if footways weren't so cartographically distinct in everyone's
> stylesheets:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/44.47772/-73.21112
>
> Should I:
>
> 1. Revert
> 2. Get in touch with the editor
> 3. Get over it
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Bill Morris
> @vtcraghead

Hi Bill :)

I was following the tagging at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:footway%3Dsidewalk

I'm personally not a fan of the way Mapnik renders footways (I'd prefer 
a thin grey line rather than a dotted red line), but it hasn't yet 
bothered me enough to propose a Mapnik change--in large part because at 
low zooms the roads cover the sidewalks.

Do you have any concerns other than display? The wiki mentions some like 
it being harder for a pedestrian router to say something like "Follow 
the sidewalk along main street" with sidewalks as separate ways. If you 
have this or any other concern, I'm happy to add more detail to help 
mitigate them.

--Andrew



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