[OSM-talk] sidewalks

Richard Mann richard.mann.westoxford at googlemail.com
Sat Aug 8 12:44:39 BST 2009


On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 12:15 AM, <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:

> a previous poster (I've lost the thread as I'm using my webmail)
> said that these could be assumed in residential areas.
>
> While residents here would like concrete paths provided in residential
> areas they are not standard by any means.
> That's why I was checking.
>
> It is most common to have a "verge" in residential areas (here) which is
> within the road reserve but is not road
>
> contents of road reserve, where the road reserve is the public land which
> contains the roadway
> fence/boundary -- verge -- kerb/guttering/table drain -- road (surfaced or
> not) -- kerb -- verge -- boundary
>
> that space "verge" may be grass, may contain a pathway, may be rough
> ground, may be a garden (although obstructing pedestrian passage is not
> legal)
> and I'm not likely to be mapping any of it while I've thousands of kms of
> roads still to go in Western NSW Au.
>

I'm not sure we'll ever achieve consensus, but there's an awful lot of
streets-with-sidewalks mapped in Europe with no reference to footway status,
and you might reasonably try to infer footway status from the highway tag
(if you don't feel able to rely on testing against an urban area polygon).
Some people might reasonably believe they could infer it from the
highway=residential tag. So it probably doesn't hurt to specify their lack,
or use highway=unclassified for roads without pavements/sidewalks. And
therein lies another tale...

I'm sorry if it seems Euro-centric, but I think we have to extend the
tagging scheme to cope with other situations, not try to throw out all the
implicit meanings we've accumulated.

RIchard
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