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.
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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:
Unambiguously
highway=crossing + crossing=unmarked (across a highway=residential). The sidewalk clearly disappears, and the pedestrian has to go into the asphalt roadway.
Case 2:
This is across a
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:
Across a public
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:
Across a
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!
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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):
- Tag the intersection node as a crossing
- Tag continuous_sidewalk=yes on the crossing node
- Tag priority as indicated by whatever, be it signs or markings, but not at the intersection node.
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:
- When the intersection is signalized and the pedestrian has a red light or don’t walk signal, the vehicle has the right of way.
- In some states, when the pedestrian is still on the other side of the street, the driver can keep going without yielding.
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:
This is a Netherlands image. Location
In the Netherlands there is this topic about this type of design.
All kind of thoughts, how to express it or not.
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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:
- This is not a
traffic_calming, because that’s not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is giving priority to pedestrians and cyclists. - It’s not a pedestrian crossing, but maybe it makes sense to mark it as a crossing for the cars by splitting the way and adding
residential=crossing(or whateverhighway-value the crossing road has) to indicate this highway=street_exitinstead of a crossing seems to be the only tagging more than 1 person finds adequate. With 0 uses so far- No one seems to know continuous sidewalks that aren’t used on crossings (mainly T-crossings)
But 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.
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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?
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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.)
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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?
The thread @Nadjita was summarising was of course about the situation in the Netherlands. It may well be the case that the primary purpose of this design in the Netherlands, Germany and other countries is to convey pedestrian priority. This is not its purpose in the UK, because pedestrians have priority anyway. The design merely visually reinforces the pedestrian priority.
Therefore we can’t rely on tags about priority alone.
I’m dwelling on the presence of continuous pavement because that’s what’s visible on the ground. It’s easy to define and easy to distinguish visually from other crossing types. (Here’s a typical example, here’s an extreme one.) It’s important to map because when this design is used for relatively busy roads, it can lead to conflict (example). Routers might want to take it into account in routing decisions or in announcements, detail-oriented renderers might want to render it differently, it could be interesting to compare how often this design has been used in different cities…
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It sounds like we might have a tag that works for everyone then? Or can anyone think of a reason we shouldn’t go with crossing=continuous?
And would it be useful to have a formal proposal? Or just go ahead and start using the tag?
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My personal favourite is crossing=sidepath, but maybe we just put them up for vote?
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The existing values of crossing= have attempted to encode if the crossing is signalized or not, if it is marked or not, and various region specific implications of each. I’d recommend against further overloading this key with another attribute (whether the crossing path is continuous or not). On the other hand perhaps the addition of crossing=continuous or crossing=continuous_path would further increase adoption of crossing:markings= and crossing:signals= to explicitly tag these attributes on continuous path crossings.
I’d suggest a new key using the crossing: namespace. Perhaps focusing on tagging which of the two intersecting ways is continuous. Something like crossing:continuity={highway class} or crossing:continuous_way={highway class}. So at a crossing between a highway=footway and a highway=tertiary you could tag crossing:continuous_way=footway to indicate that the footway is continuous across the tertiary road. For a cycleway & residential street crossing where the cycleway is continuous: crossing:continuous_way=cycleway. A schema like this would be flexible enough to handle a continuous cycleway crossing a footway without ambiguity about which one is the sidepath/sidewalk. It could also specify that a highway=pedestrian is continuous across a highway=tertiary (crossing:continuous_way=pedestrian) or vice versa (crossing:continuous_way=tertiary).
If this level of flexibility doesn’t seem necessary, there could just be two values: one for “paths” (footway, cycleway, path) and another for streets/roads (residential, unclassified, tertiary, pedestrian, etc). crossing:continuous_way=path would state that a highway=footway is continuous across a highway=unclassified. crossing:continuous_way=street would explicitly state that a highway=tertiary is continuous across a highway=cycleway but this would be the assumed default and not necessary to tag.
** After writing this I’m realizing this idea could apply to any junction between two highway= ways whether is considered a crossing or not. So it could make sense for the key to use a highway: namespace instead.
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I see - that wouldn’t just apply to sidewalks, but address a more general question, like in your earlier example where a pedestrian street continues uninterrupted across a junction with a road.
I’m worried that making it too general would raise more questions. For example, if this is to be used for all junctions, we’d need to discuss how to tag a situation where both roads are continuous (e.g. an unmarked junction of two country lanes), or how to unambiguously specify which of two roads are continuous when both are, for example, tertiary. And a tagging scheme that’s too complicated could hinder widespread adoption.
Could your suggestion be further simplified to crossing:continuous=yes? With yes meaning that the “lesser” way is continuous and no meaning that it isn’t (the implicit default).
I like the idea of a poll by the way - we’ll have to make a decision somehow.
I could see this working well. In many (most?) cases it is probably fairly clear which way is “lesser”. As with many other yes value tags, a more specific value could be used in cases where the “lesser” way is not clear.
I’d say that for most junctions this would not be useful or necessary. I was only thinking that there might be some junctions where it could be useful in which case a more general take might make sense. I take your point that a more general tag could be less clear though. The question of which way the continuous attribute applies to when two of the same classification intersect is worth considering though. Perhaps there might be an intersection between two cycleways, each with a different surface treatment, and where one is clearly continuous through the intersection while the other is interrupted.
In an ideal world, one of the cycleways would have cycleway=crossing, and the other one wouldn’t. Same goes for the continuous sidewalks: The non-sidewalk street should have something like residential=crossing, but I don’t suppose anyone wants to form a proposal for this…
I’m not sure about this. My understanding is that we tag a crossing where two different types of traffic cross and turning from one way to the other is generally not allowed or not possible. A car can’t (or at least shouldn’t!) turn off a road onto a footway that crosses it, for example. In general, where two cycleways intersect I’d expect cyclists could turn off of one and onto the other (or continue straight), just as cars generally can at a basic intersection between two residential streets. So I wouldn’t tag such an intersection as a crossing.