[OSM-talk] Rights of way again

[Mike Harris]

Nick

I'm very much with you on this. In fact, I have already started using
designated= tags as I think they solve a number of problems that have been
discussed here. If there are rendering advantages as well, so much the
better. You're more experienced in the mysterious ways of OSM than am I, so
I assume that you'll start some sort of polling / voting procedure? 


Mike Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Whitelegg [mailto:Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk] 
Sent: 03 March 2009 09:53
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: [OSM-talk] Rights of way again

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