“Continuous sidewalk” and “crossing” are not mutually exclusive terms. The things were are talking about are both. I would suggest tagging as crossing:markings=surface to indicate a different surface material than the street and then something like crossing:height=raised to indicate that pedestrians don’t step down into the street, but vehicles drive up and over the crossing instead.
I would avoid continuous_sidewalk as a key or value because the same kind of crossing can happen where an independent footpath (not a sidewalk) crosses a street.
It seems to me that continuous sidewalks represent both a geometric (how ways intersect) issue as well as a potential legal one. Perhaps neither of these can be suitably tagged using a node, as OP asked.
This table in the wiki seems to be highly relevant to our discussion. It is clear that crossing nodes would be tagged similarly for either footways crossing roads or vice versa. When I first read this discussion I immediately started thinking about crossing ways, which have the potential to but do not yet represent these differences, as the table linked above illustrates with big question marks.
It may be academic, but we’re at this point partly because people started pedantically mapping “crossings” at every point where a sidewalk meets a driveway, which made the relevant tags much less useful. We already have data model support for such a broad definition of crossing: two ways can share a node.
Continuous footways are interesting because they take all the assumptions behind crossing tagging and turn them on their head. We didn’t account for that when we made crossing a value of highway=*. It’s almost as if there should be a highway=highway_crossing tag to be applied to nodes.
You know, that’s actually not the worst idea. It sounds horrible, but it does make a lot of sense, because then, things like kerb=* would be applied to the street (not way. God, OSM is so sc***ed up with steps being highways…)
I’d be interested to hear what folks think about this location in my town where a pedestrian street intersects with a vehicle street. Pedestrians have priority and vehicles must stop for them. People routinely walk straight across with very little regard to the presence of vehicles.
The vibe on the ground is certainly that the vehicle street crosses the pedestrian street because of the surface material difference, but really both streets cross each other. There is not grade difference between the streets. There is a highway=crossing node here, but no way tagged as a crossing. If there was one, footway=crossing wouldn’t be right since the street is a highway=pedestrian. I guess pedestrian=crossing has a little bit of use. I have mapped the surface change from asphalt to brick on the cross street: Way: Bank Street (1131464701) | OpenStreetMap. If there were a “vehicular street crosses pedestrian way” tagging scheme, this would be a perfect place to use it. It certainly wouldn’t be called a continuous sidewalk though.
To me, that doesn’t look like a vehicle street being the one crossing, because I can still see a (flush) kerb for the pedestrians. But the same seems to be true for the non-pedestrian road, so I’m not sure what would apply in your legislation. In Germany, I would tag this as traffic_calming=table because of the kerb for the pedestrians, but I’m sure there’s people that would argue the other way around
Well … couldn’t something like residential=crossing / pedestrian=crossing on the node itself make it clear what is crossing what? Just a thought.
In this topic I notice that some/most/all contributors understand street or road as meaning the space reserved for motorized traffic. In my area, this is called the carriage way (Fahrbahn.)
It looks like there are continuous footways with or without (flush) kerbs (for the pedestrians), with or without tactile pavings, with or without zebra markings, and with or without changes in the colour of the surface. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may or may not have legal implications such as pedestrian priority or traffic on the side road having to give way to traffic on the main road.
They all have in common that the design gives the visual impression that the sidewalk continues without interruption and it is the side road that is interrupted. This is instantly recognisable, verifiable and sufficiently different from anything we have an established tag for that it’s worth thinking about how to tag this!
The two tags that seem to be in use are crossing=pavement and continuous_sidewalk=yes. I wanted to learn more about how crossing=pavement has been used (it is about twice as popular) so I went looking for some examples on Overpass and Mapillary.
By far the most examples (708) are in the UK e.g. this one (Mapillary, OSM) and this one (Mapillary, OSM). The handful I’ve been able to quickly find pictures for are all continuous footways. I’m just going to message some users who have used the tag a lot in case they want to chime in.
There are also some uses in other countries. In France (38 uses) most examples I’ve found are simply crossings paved with setts such as this one (Mapillary, OSM). This seems to be a “false friend” (sett is pavé in French). Interestingly I also found an example in Australia (Mapillary, OSM) where it was used like this, and another one in the US (Mapillary, OSM). But in another example in the US, it’s a continuous footway (Mapillary, OSM).
If we accept that it’s a highway=crossing, is there anything wrong with using highway=crossing crossing=pavement?
I would say, the road is crossed by an uninterrupted footway but it isn’t a sidewalk. I would probably just map this as highway=crossingcrossing:markings=surface without inventing a new tag.
The sidewalk is tagged as a standard walkway (highway=footway). If you retag it as a sidewalk (footway=sidewalk) then there will be an additional option at the top to just connect the ways without tagging a crossing.
I was focused on mitigating the most unambiguously problematic usage. If a bike path crosses a service road, there’s more likely to be a crossing of some sort. A similar bare intersection option could be useful, but I didn’t want to create any user confusion by offering a choice in that case, since a false positive crossing is not as problematic as a missing crossing. Feel free to open an issue in the iD repository to consider a more intelligent way of presenting these choices to the user.
I’m not a native speaker, but isn’t pavement the British version of sidewalk? If we use footway=sidewalk instead of footway=pavement, wouldn’t crossing=sidewalk be more consistent?
Or is there more to it that non-native speakers don’t get ?
Also, according to my dictionary, pavement is an official engineering term and same as the british carriageway, which would completely confuse me. Can someone shed some light on this one?
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