[OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

[David Earl]

I'm afraid I have just been completely overwhelmed by this thread and 
the other similar ones over the last couple of weeks while trying to 
have a life too. I am also conscious that it is a discussion that 
reignites in different guises every few months. I apologise if I'm 
repeating what's already been said.

How do you know what is "legal" vs "conventional"? Except if you are in 
a privileged position, it can only be from evidence on the ground, in 
which case what would you do different in most cases? Would you mark 
something as a cycleway where cycling (or whatever) is happening but not 
legal (as evidenced by the signage and knowledge of the relevant rules)? 
Or not for cycles when the evidence shows that it is intended so? I 
think this legal stuff is a red herring (English idiom: a distraction) 
except in certain special cases.


My feeling is that what we are missing is largely country-specific 
defaults. Or rather we have failed to recognise this in the 
documentation, but it is what pretty much everyone is doing in practice 
already, and that's got a lot going for it.

What most people are doing now and will likely continue to do is seeing 
something on the ground which says "I am a cycleway" by whatever system 
or evidence is relevant to their location, knowledge of local laws and 
rules of the road etc, and therefore tagging it highway=cycleway. The 
same applies to motorway, footway etc. What a user of the map 
understands is the same thing, because they know that cycleways or 
footways can or cannot be used by pedestrians or cyclists respectively, 
or that motorways can or cannot be used by farm vehicles, or whatever in 
that particular country.

When we have exceptions, again the common practice is for people to 
indicate them. Hence a weight limit or a time restriction.

So my feeling is we should document what collection of users a 
particular highway tag applies to by default IN EACH COUNTRY (including 
things like "under 12" or "not on a Sunday" if that's the normal 
situation). Then tags and renderings mean what ordinary people (users 
and mappers) expect them to mean.

If a particular footway is specifically open to cyclists, for example a 
permissive path that someone quoted, then if the local rules are that 
pedestrians can use cycleways, it makes no functional difference whether 
it is marked as a footway where cycling is permitted (by whatever 
tagging convention) or as a cycleway. You might choose to do one or the 
other based on a subjective judgement about the principal use, so it 
might affect how it is drawn but should not affect routers looking for 
both bicycle=yes exceptions and highway=x where x has defaults for that 
location which include bicycles.

I don't see that deviations from the normal rules for types of transport 
  are different in concept from other exceptions like weight or time limits.

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So I say: keep it simple, keep it compatible. Carry on with the simple, 
established tags we already have, but just clarify the default use 
classes which apply to each highway tag, PER COUNTRY, and tag exceptions 
to these according to evidence on the ground. Add specific legal 
designations only where expert knowledge is available and different from 
the default interpretation.
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I think the same principle applies to speed limits (motorway 70mph, 
trunk 60mph in UK, unlimited and whatever km/h in Germany etc), weight 
limits and so on.

David