[OSM-talk] Rights of way again

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello everyone,

Have had a think about this, primarily as part of developing new styles 
for the shortly to be relaunched Freemap (UK) / OpenFootMap (worldwide, 
potentially) OSM site for walkers/hikers/horse riders.

I now think the designation tag is a good thing as it simplifies the 
Mapnik XML rendering rules significantly. It could always be 
internationalised, for instance in the UK it could be "public_footpath", 
"public_bridleway", "permissive_footpath" etc, while in other countries it 
could be the equivalent.

This could then be combined with tags representing the type of way, e.g. 
track, footway and path (treating the last two equivalently for the 
moment) and surface tags to indicate the surface.

>From a rendering point of view I can envisage two layers, one for the 
physical ways and another to indicate where walkers/horse riders are 
allowed to go.

The layer would show double dashed lines for tracks or single dashed lines 
for paths/footways, and then the second layer could have thicker 
transparent lines for actual rights of way (or permissive routes), a bit 
like the cycle map. Tracks known to be private (something the Ordnance 
Survey do not show, and therefore something that could be a big advantage 
over OS maps) could be overlaid by a transparent red line to indicate "do 
not go here".

Nick