For crosswalks I have been using highway-crossing footway-crossing, but this is not rendered. However highway-footway and footway-crossing seems to render like a sidewalk when that is not the intention.
Ideas? What is the proper way to code crosswalk so they render as linear features distinct from sidewalks?
You should not map based on how it will render.
Moreover, highway=crossing, is only intended for use on nodes. You will need to use highway=footway, to connect the nodes.
The only case I can think of where a linear feature would be appropriate is if the road itself were mapped as an area.
Could you provide the location of a real life place where you believe there is a need to map a crossing as a linear feature?
PS I’m assuming that crosswalk is American English for (British English) zebra crossing, based on Google image hits, which came up before any appropriate textual usage of the word.
Ok, so should the sidewalk continue through a crossing with no breaks, and a crossing node where the sidewalk and road intersect? Or should the sidewalk have a node at the curb, but still have the linear crossing be highway-footway, footway-sidewalk?
We seem to be talking about http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/479351513
Unless you are going to micro-map the carriageway, it is not really useful to micro-map the sidewalk. As far as I know, it isn’t really possible to micro-map carriageways well, as there is no way of indicating the directions in which the area can be traversed.
In general, a crossing should be interpreted as having a length, perpendicular to the road of the typical, or declared, width of the road, and if you want to be precise, the way to do it is to explicitly declare the width of the road. The road looks under-tagged to me, anyway.
A lot of the roads, including Washington Avenue, seem to be missing sidewalk=separate tags.
As such, you should not break the sidewalk at the crossing, but simply put a crossing node where it intersects the carriageway.
If you look at Raleigh NC, they have almost all sidewalks ‘micro mapped’, so that precedent has already been set. I am mapping the sidewalks in this area for a couple of reasons, one being pedestrian routing. Plus, if a sidewalk does not follow a road, there is no way to map it if not directly.
But still, you are saying I should add sidewalk-separate on the roadways, right? Also, is there a separate forum for the OSM streets mapnik style, if this is not the place to discuss rendering questions?
Strangely, I can’t find sidewalk=separate in the wiki, but is more popular than yes on taginfo: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/sidewalk#values
That might be because the ITO Maps sidewalk coverage checker recognizes it: http://product.itoworld.com/map/126?lon=-83.42112&lat=39.53797&zoom=15
sidewalk=separate means the sidewalks are mapped separately. Valid values for sidewalk are both, left, right, none and separate. I’d assume yes is a synonym for both and no for none.
The assumption that one needs to map sidewalks distinctly in order to have pedestrian routing is one that I would question. I’ve been using OSM-based maps on phones & GPSr for years: almost entirely for pedestrian routing. My experience is that separately mapped sidewalks can actually impair critical aspects of pedestrian routing. One of my major use cases is planning when I leave to catch public transport: accurate routes are important, but because separately mapped sidewalks only allow crossing of roads at mapped crossings they often produce routes much longer than one might expect.
Another frequently mentioned usecase is for wheelchair routing. However, the practical level of detail really needed for this is often not mapped. SomeoneElse made a small experiment on mapping necessary information and the effort needed on a city wide scale is vast (for instance all kerb drops need to be mapped & their height measured). Furthermore there is a very wide range of what individual wheelchair users will be happy with, and it’s difficult to find a single common expression for this. Also, the risks associated with potentially poor or inaccurate data are sufficiently high that it’s unlikely that an individual would commit to a route solely based on OSM. A similar point applies for routing for the blind.
Just adding sidewalk tags to the road is fine for most purposes: and certainly to be advocated as a standard approach whilst a given city has lots of obvious features unmapped.
The OP was mapping separately, and without that, the question wouldn’t have arisen. However he was not putting sidewalk=separate on the road itself.
Personally, I’d only be the first person to map a sidewalk as separate if there was significant divergence from the carriageway, e.g. a railway bridge near me, where the carriageway dips to gain clearance, but the sidewalk stays level and is fenced off from the sheer drop onto the carriageway. In that case, you physically cannot cross the road in that stretch.
As well as the points already noted, junctions can be messy and the transition back to merged sidewalks is usually particularly messy.
Back to my original question…does the OpenStreetMap streets style served at OpenStreetMap.org have a style for a linear crossing? If so, what is the proper tag for this feature. If not, fine.
I don’t think that there is an “OpenStreetMap streets style” served at osm.org is there?
There’s the general “standard” one (which has the twin competing goals of “looking nice” and “providing mapper feedback”), the cycle and transport maps, and the “humanitarian” maps (similar to “standard” in scope but with different feature rendering).
The cycle map does render highway=crossing nodes: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/25313948#map=18/52.00868/-0.98027&layers=C . I don’t think that the others do.
Nothing as far as I am aware renders highway=crossing “ways” such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/450084963#map=18/52.21247/0.13607&layers=C . There was an armchair effort recently to get rid of those because they are “invalid” (though there was criticism at the time because often a highway=crossing way was the least-worst way of mapping a real-world feature).
If you want a map that renders something not shown on one of the 4 styles at osm.org I’d create your own. It’s not that difficult, and via a bit of browser trickery you can replace one of the styles at osm.org with it: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SomeoneElse/Your_tiles_from_osm.org .