Imagine a street with a single barrier (gate, lift_gate) and no pedestrian/cycle route beside it - there is no way around the barrier, you need to surpass it somehow. All foot/bicycle access is legal, but the gate does not open per se for full access. Here’s the exact place I’m thinking of. If discussing based on google material is frowned upon, here’s a good example in the wiki - just imagine those gate arms closed and disregard the bridge, traffic lights and stop sign, and also imagine there are no hanging barriers below the gate arm (you can crouch and go under).
My question is this: how exactly should you map foot= and bicycle= values? I feel bicycle=yes would imply that you can ride through/under the gate without dismounting, but in my example that would not be possible, you would have to dismount at least, and possibly tilt your bike down and crouch to get past under the barrier. I also feel foot=yes would imply unimpended access but that is not exactly true, you would have to crouch or squeeze by at the tip.
The problem I am pondering is this: if you map these as simply “yes” (or some variation such as “destination”), most routing engines would probably guide you through as if it was a normal piece of the street! I feel there should be a way to tag minor physical inconvenience that can nonetheless be overcome if you have a sound body, but that WILL inconvenience you and cost you some time, and that routing engines could/should not prioritise as much. Is there some way to accomplish this?
Thanks for your response. I have considered bicycle=dismount, but does that not signify the legality of cycling, so not applicable here? Or is it also used to signify the level of ease of cycling? I didn’t see that on the wiki.
For example obstacle=vegetation is another way to signify the ease of cycling but of course that is only valid for vegetation.
As far as I know there isn’t a currently accepted or widely-used way to tag/map this.
Everyone is free to come up with tags that they feel are appropriate, so you could tag it as something like foot=yes_if_you_crouch but there would be no support from routers.
You could attempt to approximate it with tags like maxwidth:physical=* as specified for Tag:barrier=cycle_barrier - OpenStreetMap Wiki. opening=* as described on that page is another option, but probably less widely understood.
An unorthodox option could be Tag:barrier=height_restrictor - OpenStreetMap Wiki with maxheight=1 m or so, but I doubt foot and bicycle routers look at maxheight tags, and this barrier isn’t really a height restrictor.
wheelchair=no and an appropriate wheelchair:description=* are an option since wheelchair:description is fairly widely used.
Personally I would tag this as barrier=lift_gate, motor_vehicle=private (or other value as appropriate), and a human-readable description=* describing foot/bicycle access possibilities.
