[OSM-talk] Permissive or Suggested

Nick Whitelegg Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk
Mon Feb 5 12:17:14 GMT 2007


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Subject:        [OSM-talk] Permissive or Suggested

>I've been wondering about this for some time, but now really need to sort 
it
>casue In the last week I've mapped the following a lot.  Permissive 
ways...

>On the Recomended UK public rights of way page (
>http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/UK_public_rights_of_way#Permissive_footpath

>) It says that I should attach foot=permiisve.  I have 2 concerns with 
this.

>1)  The tag seems to be a bit messy and not fall into the neat 
catagorising
>style that was originally made.  Shouldn't it be permiisve=footway,
>bridleway....etc?  Then 1 catagorie holds them all.

This seems more confusing to me, as we're already saying it's a footway or 
a bridleway with the highway tag. That said it's probably best left as it 
is until we have the separate tags for legal status and track width.

Then we could have:
highway = path or highway = track or highway = narrow_path (or whatever)
foot = yes

or whatever, for a public footpath and

highway = path or highway = track or highway = narrow_path
foot = permissive

for a permissive path.

The separate foot/horse/bicycle/car tags just seem to be the easiest way 
to deal with the vast number of different permission combinations possible 
- rather like having bits which can be set or unset, only with three/four 
values (yes, no, permissive, private)

2)  There are pemissive and suggested footways.  Now although in the
>parragraph it says forestry commision land is a good example of 
permissive,
>I don't think it really is.  I can think of a few examples of where
>permissive doesnt seem correct.  The New Forest.  Scotland in General,
>Finland (from irc disccussion).   These paths are permissive in the sence
>that they could be removed, but Its extreamly unlikely.  I would say no 
more
>likely than public footpaths being closed (e.g Foot and Mouth outbreak).

I guess I see your point there. I have tagged a whole range of things, 
from an urban alleyway in Southampton, through paths in the New Forest, to 
a route up a Scottish Munro as highway=footway; foot=permissive which, for 
these three, probably not strictly correct. Maybe just "highway=footway" 
could be used for these three, as although they are not rights of way, 
they do have a legal "you can go there, perhaps with certain restrictions" 
status (e.g. field sports, forestry operations)


>For Rendering I was thinking permissive could probabky be dashed lines, 
but
>suggested could be desaturated.   OS used desaturated and dashed as 
dashed
>is how they usually mark there ways, and this works well, but it would be
>nice to render things differently to how they do it.

I'm playing around with different rendering on free-map.org.uk/mapnik 
which is aimed to provide OSM maps specialised for the countryside. At the 
moment rights of way are red and "permissive" tracks are magenta - 
comments welcome.

Nick








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