[OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

[James Livingston]

On 12/08/2009, at 8:14 PM, Pieren wrote:
> Note that in France, pedestrians are not allowed on cycleways. I don't
> see why we should add "foot=no" now in all cycleways in France. I read
> somewhere that some motorways  in US gives access to bicycles. Does it
> mean that we have to add "bicycle=no" to all other motorways in the
> world ?

Either you have to do this, or software (in this case for routing)  
needs to know about all the quirks of different jurisdictions, which  
is a point I tried to make in the Australian-residential-tagging  
thread. In practice you probably wouldn't do it in the routing  
software itself, but when transforming the data from OSM format to  
whatever the router uses.

Having tags whose implications change from region to region is asking  
to confuse people. Back when I lived in the ACT (Australia), I  
wouldn't expect to be required to tag things differently  if I'm a few  
kilometres away from home, across the border in NSW.