Oh yes I would consider both “sidepath” and “sidewalk” to be accurate terms for the section that runs along Wilmer Avenue. If pedestrians were not allowed (bicycles only) then I’d say it’s not a sidewalk because it is not for walking.
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It seems that you’re coming from a country where only an unsigned sidewalk is a sidewalk. This doesn’t hold true for all countries. Or maybe our understanding of what makes a sidewalk in OSM is completely different, which would be no surprise 
As far as I know, this tagging is only used in the Netherlands, regional differences may apply. At least the discussion about this tagging was pretty recent.
A combined footway and cycleway (segregated or not) is considered a sidewalk over here. I think the exact definition of a sidewalk varies from country to country, and you have to accept that what you consider a sidewalk is not a sidewalk somewhere else and vice versa.
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Kerbs certainly do cause inconvenience. In Norway, cycleways have kerbs at junctions, and raised cycle lanes (à la Copenhagen) do not. If your point was to capture in OSM that there are kerbs at junctions, I see no way to conclude this from sidewalk tagging.
This looks like a signed cycleway, based on this image. If I’m correct in that, then legally, it’s a cycleway. If you tag it with sidewalk, you will be confusing data consumers who can’t tell if it’s legally a cycleway or legally a pavement. I know the rules in France generally do not allow cycling on pavements, so this is very important information for data consumers.
It seems you want to capture that the cycleway is built similarly to a pavement. In NO, we do this using cycleway=track on the carriageway. They do the same in DK (ref Copenhagen). For a separately mapped cycleway, the proposed key separation=* can be used to indicate a kerb instead of a verge.
I hope this can be properly translated back to French. 
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*=sidewalk does nothing tell about the legal access. (maybe it gives a hint of foot access, but) access is derived from highway and access tags.
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The laws in Norway explicitly mention pavement, footway and cycleway as separate legal subjects. Most of the time, the rules applied are the same, but sometimes, they are not.
Some examples:
A footway or a cycleway must be signposted for the law to apply. A pavement cannot be signposted and the law still applies.
If something that looks like a pavement is signposted as a footway or cycleway, the sign takes legal priority over the looks.
When a driver of a vehicle crosses a pavement, the driver has to yield to a cyclist on the pavement. When a driver of a vehicle crosses a cycleway, a cyclist on the cycleway may have to yield to the driver, or the driver to the cyclist, depending on the type of junction.
A property owner is legally required to clear snow from any pavements bordering the property, but not from a footway or cycleway.
Cycling on a pavement is only allowed if pedestrian traffic is sparse, and passing pedestrians is only allowed at walking pace. There are no such rules for cycleways, even if the cycleway looks similar to a pavement.
Regarding legal access, highway=cycleway has an implied legal access, highway=footway has another, and highway=footway + footway=sidewalk has yet another, which at the current time is identical to the legal access for highway=footway, but there’s no guarantee it will stay this way.
footway=sidewalk matters legally.
The term “sidewalk” may matter in your country. You have to find a solution in your OSM country community how to model this concept of “sidewalk” in OSM.
Typically you will model a “sidewalk” as highway=footway (plus perhaps footway=sidewalk)
The tag footway=sidewalk in osm has no meaning about legal access.
The meaning of the word sidewalk may differ in different communities. It get’s even more complicated by translating it into other languages. The OSM tags use English words.A tag is just a name for something that needs to be defined in the wiki. The defined meaning may differ from the meaning you personally expect.
BTW. There is not realy a definition of what a sidewalk is in the osm wiki.
sidewalks (also known as pavement/footway in the UK or a footpath in Australia) as distinct ways from the carriageway.
There is a cross reference to Wikipedia but in Wikipedia you read also this:
In some places, the same term may also be used for a paved path, trail or footpath that is not next to a road, such as a path through a park .
That would mean a sidewalk may be any kind of path. But I have to guess that this was not the intention of footway=sidewalk.
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Which there is. NO is not an issue here at all.
Correct tagging in OSM means data consumers can derive the correct legal status of the real world infrastructure that OSM is modelling. Whether or not OSM has defined an implied legal access does not alone define the value of correct tagging.
Can you please explain.
Please don’t misunderstand me. But I really don’t understand what you’re trying to get at with this discussion.
- Define the term sidewalk?
- Define the tag footway=sidewalk?
- Define the tag cylceway=sidewalk or declare it nonsense?
If it is not the last point, then we may open a new thread
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The fact that OSM doesn’t define an implied legal access for footway=sidewalk, doesn’t mean that data consumers can’t infer legal [access] information from footway=sidewalk.
Your apparent assertion that since OSM doesn’t define legal access for footway=sidewalk, there’s no legal info associated with footway=sidewalk, is not correct in my opinion.
A pavement is a legal term in many European highway codes. So is a cycleway. It can’t be both at the same time.
Perhaps this is different for the US, but there are many European mappers in this thread that are arguing that cycleway=sidewalk makes sense. I’m trying to show how it also doesn’t make sense.
People in this thread seem to reason that a certain visual appearence is justification for cycleway=sidewalk because this is the way it is for footway=sidewalk – i.e. that this tag captures appearance and nothing else, so it can be combined with anything.
I’m trying to show that there are other, sometimes more important, factors to consider, such as what the law says. Just because a mapper thinks of something as a pavement, doesn’t mean it is a pavement. It might mean the mapper doesn’t have enough knowledge of the world to accurately map, and should accept the feedback given…
In the end, my position is that cycleway=sidewalk is a misnomer, and whatever information people want to capture, is more accurately captured using other tags, such as:
is_sidepath=yes
separation=kerb
sidewalk=left|right
etc.
So we end up with the main road (carriageway) saying sidewalk:left=separate, then the “sidewalk” is actually highway=cycleway + is_sidepath=yes + sidewalk=left? How many sidewalks are there: 1 or 2? To me that looks like the carriageway has one, and the cycle way has another one. But things aside.
The purpose of this thread was not to find out how to tag a sidewalk, but what the most likely meaning of cycleway=sidewalk is, because that tag is undocumented. But we seem to be in agreement that people are trying to say that “the cycleway is the sidewalk”. Now the only thing that could happen is the following:
tagged like this:
highway=cycleway
cycleway=sidewalk
(example)
Why? Because some people call every sidepath a sidewalk, no matter if you’re actually allowed to walk on them or not. Or they simply had a brainfart for a moment – I don’t know.
There are quite a few cycleways tagged like this. Here cycleway=sidewalk seems to say “the cycleway is on the sidewalk”. Once foot=anything but no is added, my understanding shifts to “This is a shared-use path that is the sidewalk”.
For the case of cycleways not allowing pedestrians at all, I think we can all agree that highway=cycleway + is_sidepath=yes would be the preferred tagging. For the other case, I would document it as “in use”, but whether cycleway=sidewalk or footway=sidewalk is to be used, seems to be disputed (in countries where a shared-use path is actually legally a sidewalk).
I guess I should explain. For me, it started with searching for an analogy to footway=sidewalk|crossing|traffic_island. This distinction isn’t expressed by is_sidepath=yes. So I started adding path|cycleway=sidewalk|sidepath, in all four combinations. Eventually, after looking at current usage, sidewalk seemed more common so I chose this.
In my German, urban environment, I understand this tagging as “the cycleway is located on the sidewalk, so next to the street and separated by a kerb”. I haven’t though about other forms of separation or bicycle sidepaths without a foot sidewalk nearby.
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If you are confused by this tagging, it is because the tagging is confusing. The carriageway doesn’t have a sidewalk/pavement if the sidewalk/pavement is on the cycleway.
There are many possible intentions behind cycleway=sidewalk. That’s part of the problem. And it is my opinion that those intentions are better captured using different tagging, which has the benefit of not being self-contradictory in many jurisdictions.
The intention “this cycleway is on the pavement” is a legal impossibility in large parts of Europe – see my previous explanations about that. If it makes sense in other parts of the world, please elaborate.
The intention “this cycleway functions as the pedestrian facility for a nearby carriageway with a tagged separated sidewalk” is better handled by tagging it as a multi-use foot/cycle path/way. The requirement for the word “sidewalk” to appear on both ways is not documented as a requirement for data consumers to be able to understand this, and seems to be more about lexical symmetry than anything else.
The entire term “sidewalk” itself seems to be poorly defined, and this is probably exacerbating the problem.
It seems you want to capture that the physical construction of the cycleway is with a kerb, and that it runs parallell to a carriageway.
In that case, the established schema is cycleway:left|right=track on the carriageway (wiki), or possibly highway=cycleway + is_sidepath=yes + separation=kerb if mapped as a separate line.
It is my understanding that a cycleway cannot be a pavement in Germany, since cycling on the pavement is generally prohibited. So your tagging is quite confusing.
In the U.S., where the term originated, “sidewalk” is usually also defined in highway codes, as is “driveway”. However, I think the vast majority of mappers here prefer to apply the tag intuitively based on the geometry and appearance, because the legal definitions are generally intended to model the intuitive understanding. To the extent that the definitions differ, mappers here would consider any rule lawyering to be pedantry.
cycleway=* answers the question, “What kind of cycling infrastructure is it?” Thus, cycleway=track means it’s a cycle track, not that cyclists must ride on a highway=track. To me, sidewalk is inaccurate, saying that there is a sidewalk that is a kind of cycling infrastructure. Others apparently read it as, “This is a sidewalk for bikes,” or, “This is a bike path where there would ordinarily be a sidewalk.”
From a motorist perspective, it’s all the same anyways. But to me as a mapper, this conflation is problematic because there can also be cycling “infrastructure” in the form of a sidewalk where a sidewalk would normally be – the no-build option so beloved by American highway planners. These are sidewalks but not anything recognizable as bikeways out of context.
Practically speaking, a renderer might have a heuristic to hide sidewalks because they’re redundant to streets, or a router could tell a pedestrian to follow [name of street] instead of “unnamed sidewalk”. Replacing cycleway=sidewalk with something different like cycleway=sidepath or, ugh, is_sidepath=yes would exclude these sidepaths from such heuristics, but I think that’s a good thing. These are more substantial paths replete with their own street furniture that doesn’t belong to the parallel street.
That is true, but a lot of shared-use paths are mapped with highway=cycleway + foot=designated, so it’s not a cycleway anymore. Whether that is good tagging practice or not, is a completely different question, I just want to illustrate that this exists and is quite common in some areas.
Yes, that’s definitly a problem. Especially because everyone has a specific picture in their head when you say “sidewalk”.
Well yes and no. If, in your jurisdiction, a shared-use path cannot be a sidewalk, then no one in your jurisdiction should tag them with *=sidewalk, in order to avoid these contradictions. If, like over here, that’s perfectly legal and fine, the question is just, whether we consider the used tags valid or not. But if one allows path=sidewalk, then cycleway=sidewalk is just a logical consequence, even though it sounds wrong
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We have different words in German for sidewalk
- Fußweg / Fußgängerweg (footway, only pedestrians)
- Bürgersteig (sidewalk, with curb, raised)
- Gehweg (can be both above, may include the hole space beside the carriageway including parking spaces, trees, cycleway)
StVO:
“Wer zu Fuß geht, muss die Gehwege benutzen”.
“Fahrzeuge müssen die Fahrbahnen benutzen, … . Seitenstreifen sind nicht Bestandteil der Fahrbahn.”
The traffic law use the word “Gehweg”. This does not mean that the “Gehweg” is raised or has curbs. It simple means a sidepath for pedestrians (and maybe also other street users). And it is not written, that you not allowed to drive on a “Gehweg”. It’s written, that vehicles have to use the carriageway, but it me be allowed by sign to park on a “Gehweg”.
I think most of us now agree that cycleway=sidewalk is not a good idea and that it would be better to express it using other tags that clearly describe the situation.
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Agreed. This is a less than ideal solution to the problem that OSM doesn’t have a term for multi/shared use pedestrian and cycle infrastructure. But it seems we all managed to agree on it somehow?
It seems then that we are facing the choice of standardising on solution A, which seemingly poses no conflict to anyone, but requires a bit more care when tagging, or solution B, which is self-contradictory in many jurisdictions and requires those jurisdictions to enforce the use of solution A anyway.
Why would we include B?
Genuine question.
Also, where is “over here” where cycleway=sidewalk is perfectly legal and fine?
I think you are misunderstanding what I’m trying to say: if, in your country, a shared-use path is by definition not a sidewalk, don’t tag with with *=sidewalk.
If, in other countries, they can be, then those that are, should be tagged with *=sidewalk.
if we need to distinguish between “running parallel to a street (roadside)” and “sidewalk”, then is_sidepath=yes is the way to go. Whether *=sidewalk impliesis_sidepath=yes, and/or is_sidepath=yes implies it’s a sidewalk as well, will probably be different in each country
I live in Germany, and I’ve seen lots of path=sidewalk tags. If you consider this correct tagging, you will have to apply the same logic to cycleway=sidewalk.
Personally, as I’ve said before, I only ever use footway=sidewalk, on both footway and path. And I usually retag highway=cycleway + foot=designated to highway=path-tags, just not outside of my “homezone”.
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