Also going a bit off topic, but for the situation you describe, with no crossing infrastructure whatsoever, we now have
crossing=informal. This is to distinguish it from situations where there is at least a dropped kerb, tactile paving or an island or but no road markings (crossing=unmarked).
interesting, I would see this as a subset of crossing=unmarked
It’s not the same. crossing=informal is used where you can and may cross the road, but there is no visible infrastructure. Meaning: the only way to know it’s a pedestrian crossing, is because a footway/path and another highway are crossing.
Back to topic.
I see that there are 2 different suggestions:
crossing=sidewalk/pavement to indicate a continuous sidewalk. Would be odd in situations where the footway/cycleway crossing isn’t actually a sidewalk. The same holds true for continuous_sidewalk=yes.highway=highway_crossing or similar to indicate that the “highway”/carriageway is crossing the footway/cycleway/path, not the other way around.I wan to stress that this about a “crossing” that looks like your regular driveway going over a sidewalk with the complete absence of any kerb or crossing indicator like tactile pavings.
Personal opinion: crossing=sidewalk is easy to grasp, even if there’s 1% of these types of crossing, where the footway crossing is probably not a sidewalk. Would native speakers have issues if this attribute was put on a crossing with a “highway” and a cycleway? If so, would something like crossing=footway/cycleway/path instead make more sense?
See I just looked at the pictures on the wiki and it seemed like the best fit to to me. I’m a simple man who sees what looks like a crossing and maps it as a crossing, while lacking awareness of these legal nuances 
.
Fair enough. I wasn’t using the term “designated” very deliberately there. I was just clarifying that you wouldn’t litter a road with crossings just because someone could physically walk across at any arbitrary point, and you also wouldn’t litter a sidewalk with driveway crossings either. Feel free to communicate that point in a different manner.
(In my dialect, it’s very common to say “designated crossing” to mean “a place where common sense tells you you’re supposed to cross”. It doesn’t mean the mayor has signed an ordinance dedicating it to pedestrians. But I should be more careful throwing this word around in an OSM context, where designated has acquired more than one specific meaning.)
Anyhow, it sounds like we agree that a crossing necessarily allows crossing after all.
What I meant is that crossing:markings=surface may accurately describe your example, but we’d be reading too much into this tag by assuming it gives pedestrians the right of way, since usually the reverse is true.
Going back to your example:
I agree with your observation, but for a different reason: traffic on Bank Street must stop for pedestrian traffic, as indicated by the stop sign and painted stop line, whereas the pedestrian street has no signage or markings to indicate that they must yield the right of way, not even a curb. It doesn’t matter if the crossing is distinguished by these brick pavers, zebra stripes, or polka dots.
In other words, this is a two-way-stop intersection, not a mid-block crossing. Maybe the most appropriate tag here is highway=priority rather than anything crossing-related:
I look forward to someday deprecating the crossing=* key outright, so we can get out of the business of evaluating priority and right of way when it follows the regional default anyways. It would be up to a router to recognize that a pedestrian doesn’t have the right of way at a mid-block highway=crossing crossing:markings=surface in the U.S. (with an implied crossing:signals=no and crossing:signed=no), so it should penalize the crossing accordingly. A table on the wiki, or better yet a machine-readable file in a Git repository, would be very useful for harmonizing these inferences.
In the meantime, as long as we’re explicitly classifying crossings, we should avoid introducing tags that mislead when taken at face value. It’s already bad enough that a zebra crossing is not where zebras cross and an uncontrolled crossing is by definition controlled by markings. If a crossing is marked by something that isn’t legally recognized, I’d hesitate to classify it as a marked crossing, but crossing:markings=surface can still apply.
| Minh_Nguyen Minh Nguyễn
October 2 |
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Fair enough. I wasn’t using the term “designated” very deliberately there.
yes, this is what I thought
I was just clarifying that you wouldn’t litter a road with crossings just because someone could physically walk across at any arbitrary point, and you also wouldn’t litter a sidewalk with driveway crossings either. Feel free to communicate that point in a different manner.
I don’t think we must map highway=crossings on every driveway, but what is definitely worth to map are the kerbs along driveways, particularly when they are raised, these can become a real annoyance, e.g. for wheelchairs, children on bikes or with a pram.
Fun fact. I mapped a sidewalk separately the other day. It crosses a side road using the continuous footway design that we have been discussing. I didn’t tag the crossing node at all, instead I opened this thread to find out how it should be tagged. Now a StreetComplete user has been asked “Is there a crossing here?” and they selected “No, but crossing is possible here”. This has resulted in the tag crossing=informal on the continuous footway. That’s obviously wrong, though I can’t blame anyone. It just shows that we need a tag for this situation (and once it’s been agreed I’ll open an issue in the StreetComplete issue tracker to get software support).
For what it’s worth, I’d be happy with crossing=sidewalk, even if we’re talking about a cycle path on the pavement. I would also be happy with crossing=continuous_sidewalk which is probably even clearer. In my mind such a tag would only be for a continuous footway or cycleway, not for a case like in @ezekielf’s example. The more general case of “which highway crosses which” seems much more subjective and hard to grasp. But I’ll the native speakers answer
Just to avoid any potential misunderstandings, I’m not proposing that we tag every node where a sidewalk and a driveway meet as crossing=continuous_footway. What triggered the question was a residential/sidewalk crossing, where this sort of design is much more unusual.
I always find these sorts of topics fascinating, as I’m interested in urban foot mapping and it always quickly becomes clear that the lived pedestrian experience is so variable across the world. In the interest of “concrete” examples, I took some pictures on my walk this morning relevant to this tagging question.
Case 1:
highway=crossing + crossing=unmarked (across a highway=residential). The sidewalk clearly disappears, and the pedestrian has to go into the asphalt roadway.
Case 2:
highway=service entrance to a parking garage to the right, but the sidewalk clearly dips to “road” level, evidenced by the curb cut. It’s currently tagged as highway=crossing + crossing=marked, though crossing=uncontrolled could conceivably also be tagged (I don’t particularly like crossing=uncontrolled, but my rant against it is probably off topic here)
Case 3:
highway=service + service=alley. This one’s a little less clear: there’s a stenciled in flush curb, but the alley is at the same level and made of the same concrete surface as the sidewalk. In my mind, the sidewalk here isn’t really interrupted, but I could understand someone else interpreting this differently. Until the most recent post, I assume this was the case for which the new crossing=sidewalk was being advocated, but now I’m not totally sure. crossing=marked + crossing:markings=surface doesn’t seem quite right here either. I’d probably just map the intersection between the sidewalk and alleyway as a bare node TBH.
Case 4:
highway=service leading to a parking lot for some businesses. Clearly to me here, the sidewalk is not interrupted, as it remains concrete despite the parking lot to the left being asphalt. It does dip a bit on the right side to accommodate the curb cut. I would leave this intersection as a bare node, which is how it’s currently mapped.
Interested in any thoughts on these examples with regards to the current topic!
Completely agree with your reasoning. The majority of driveways crossing a sidewalk look like the last 2 pictures. Because neither iD, nor SC asks for the type of these crossings, it’s simply assumed that they are “continuous sidewalks”. Oor maybe that there’s close to no traffic, so no reason to add this for routing purposes. Nice examples!
Do “stop” and “give way” signs apply to pedestrian traffic crossing thed road in the US? I’m asking, because in Germany, they don’t. “give way” and “stop” signs means you have to yield to other vehicles - not pedestrians. The only reason to put a stop sign there would be if any form of vehicle was allowed in the pedestrian zone, be it delivery or bicycles at certain hours. Interesting.
That’s also true in Nederland. Priority for pedestrians is granted by zebra stripes. (Not by fancy artwork striping on a slightly raised surface, though; that would amount to a table). That sais, the STOP signs do force traffic to stop first. In Nederland, I think they would paint a stretched out zebra, where vehicles can’t wait for the whole zebra to be clear of pedestrians, but have to find there way very slowly through the masses. I know a few places like that in Rotterdam. Sounds dangerous - but in fact it works like a charm: the pedestrian swarm moves itself around the slowly moving vehicles.
Having seen all arguments, I guess my preference would be to keep as close to the visual reality as possible and stay away from mapping implications.
Which means, to me (leaving private single-house driveways out of it at the moment):
Re 2: Or a comparable tag, saying that the sidewalk simply traverses the road. crossing=sidewalk would convey the information just as well, I think.
I guess 1 and 2 could also be tagged on the section of sidewalk traversing the road. Just the node seems more practical to me.
Re 3: In Nederland, this would be a kerb that the vehicles have to cross, possibly with explicit markings such as shark’s teeth at both sides of the sidewalk. The give_way would have to be tagged as nodes on the carriageway way, where it crosses the kerbs.
The situation where a kerbed pedestrian area traverses a vehicle carriageway where there is no cariageway junction, I would not map as a continuous sidewalk. It’s a way over a pedestrian area, I think, and the appropriate attributes would have to be tagged on this way.
Yes. This is the key difference from Germany in the priority diagram posted earlier:
In the U.S., as the pedestrian crosses the side street, the vehicle must yield to the pedestrian
regardless of the direction the vehicle is coming from. Sometimes there are signs to remind turning drivers of this rule.
There are two exceptions:
As for the Bank Street example, pedestrian malls aren’t especially common in the first place. Many follow conventional crosswalks across streets, in which case a highway=footway footway=crossing can reasonably interrupt the highway=pedestrian. These crosswalks may be signalized:
When a bike trail or bike-hike trail crosses a road, there’s usually a stop sign to tell trail users to wait for vehicles. But some trails give the right of way to trail users instead, so the streets have stop signs combined with plaques to warn drivers that cross traffic doesn’t stop. Notice how the street appears continuous in terms of pavement, but the stopping rules are completely different.
The examples given by @willkmis are much less substantial, probably with not enough traffic to warrant additional signage that can clarify the situation.
additional:
Topic start example:
Thanks for that link. It took me a while, my Dutch is very, very rusty. Until I remembered that translate button…
Anyway, to me it looks like the general take aways are:
traffic_calming, because that’s not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is giving priority to pedestrians and cyclists.residential=crossing (or whatever highway-value the crossing road has) to indicate thishighway=street_exit instead of a crossing seems to be the only tagging more than 1 person finds adequate. With 0 uses so farBut there was no final solution to the tagging question, and I think crossing=sidewalk is already a very good candidate. If we ever see a construction like this not used at a crossing, then we would need a different tagging, yes. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, we might never find one.
Exit construction, they use this part of legislation
art.54 RVV as part of Special manoeuvres
translation:
Drivers performing a special manoeuvre, such as pulling away, reversing, entering the road from an exit, turning from a road into an entrance, reversing, entering the through lane from the acceleration lane, entering the exit lane from the through lane and changing lanes must give way to other traffic.
Not only for pedestrian and cyclist, but all the others, also on the carriageway. In this example the G12a traffic sign, the mofa and moped on the cycleway.
The court, decided, also of importance is the continuous surface of the footway or cycleway, if it is a exit construction, and not so much the kerb. It is the combination of elements that makes it a exit construction.
but there is also crossing=cycleway? is this a good term, behind each other, continuous cycleway.
and a sidewalk is a footway, continuous footway. Why not footway, just as cycleway. And there is continuous path.
Well, I guess we have problems naming things again. People consider the “sidewalk” to be anything from a lane on the road to a kerb-separated physical construction. What I want to refer to is the consturction we see on your picture. If it’s pedestrian only, shared use, or bicycle only - I don’t care. So pretty much everything that’s not the carriageway. If there is a prooper term to denote this part of the road, then this should be used, not “sidewalk”. But IIRC, we had this discussion before, and there was no such term 
Now that we use use_sidepath, sidepath could this be the term?
Or how about crossing=continuous? This works for both footways and cycleways, and it emphasises the most important attribute of this kind of crossing. (My hope is that if you see the term in a drop-down menu in iD, it’s more self explanatory than sidepath.)
To me this suggests some kind of analogy with priority_road=yes_unposted. The only reason we’ve been dwelling on the presence of continuous pavement is that this is how priority is often communicated in certain countries. Yet my last example shows that a cycleway can have priority despite a discontinuous pavement. Fortunately, in this particular case, highway=stop on the roadway and highway=priority on the intersection get the point across without requiring new tagging. Can we rely on that to be the case?