Entrance=entrance and how to map entrance only entrances

If someone added a oneway=yes tag to a highway=footway, it would only make sense for the oneway tag to be for pedestrians and not for vehicles.

what about highway=pedestrian? Or highway=path foot=designated?

It turns out both OSRM and GraphHopper ignore oneway=yes on highway=footway, but Valhalla does honor it. And as you’ve probably noticed, openstreetmap-carto also renders one-way arrows based on oneway=yes alone.

If this is an implementation bug in Valhalla and openstreetmap-carto, it’s also a problem for OSM: 28,713 highway=pedestrian/footway/steps/corridor ways have oneway=yes/-1, vastly more than have oneway:foot=yes/-1 (642) or your suggestion of foot:forward/backward=no (just 64). I did not check whether mappers have identified thousands of footways and staircases that Vienna-style vehicles are allowed to climb.

Apparently the presumption that oneway=* only applies to vehicles dates to 2009 and was retrofitted into the oneway=* documentation in 2011. I mostly have no problem with it, since otherwise we’d be constantly fighting against accidental oneways that fail to consider pedestrians walking down the street. But now we have the opposite problem of leading pedestrians down walkways in the wrong direction, sometimes precariously as in that cliffside example, because of insisting that the same rules apply to footways.

Incidentally, the conveying=* key, with nearly 24,000 occurrences, also implies a direction even in the absence of oneway=*. (It implies the opposite direction for hamsters.) But fortunately, I’ve never encountered a moving walkway or escalator that goes directly into an entrance-only door without some kind of landing in between. That would be tailor-made for an animated GIF.

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I wonder who it was who added that clause to the wiki page? :slight_smile:

Maybe it does make sense to clarify that pedestrians are allowed to walk both ways on the pavement alongside a oneway tertiary (or whatever) road, but it would fail the Clapham omnibus test to think that somehow “oneway=yes” on a “highway=footway” meant you could walk both ways along it.

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Thanks @BaghdadiMapper for bringing up highway=footway with oneway=yes.

Yes, oneway=yes is more popular then oneway:foot=yes and I updated the stats in my previous email. It looks like the the most popular alternative apart from exit=yes.

highway=pedestrian oneway=yes to mean oneway just for vehicles is actually fairly common (those vehicles that are allowed on the street at all). From what I’ve seen these are signed just like other oneway streets so it’s natural to tag them as oneway=yes when you see the sign, instead of something like oneway:vehicle=yes or oneway=yes plus oneway:foot=no.

That is what my bug report in Valhalla was about.

A sophisticated router might realise that in highway=footway oneway=yes, the oneway tag was probably meant for pedestrians… though it seems to me like this guessing game can quickly get complicated: how do you interpret the oneway tag if the highway=footway also has bicycle=yes or designated? What if it’s a path instead? A cycleway?

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I stand corrected. Make that a mere 16,527 highway=footway/steps/corridor to fix and a bunch of mappers and software developers to convince. :grimacing:

To me, this is no different than deciding what access=* means on a highway=footway etc. Does access=permissive open up the footway to vehicular traffic? How about oneway=no? I think there’s a mode of transportation inherent in a tag like highway=footway, part of its essence that can’t be troll-tagged away so easily using a more general access tag.

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it’s also a problem for OSM: 28,713 highway=pedestrian/footway/steps/corridor ways have oneway=yes/-1, vastly more than have oneway:foot=yes/-1 (642) or your suggestion of foot:forward/backward=no (just 64). I did not check whether mappers have identified thousands of footways and staircases that Vienna-style vehicles are allowed to climb.

at least for pedestrian it is very likely correct mapping and applies to vehicles on these pedestrian streets, is regularly signposted etc. Oneway on a pedestrian road is a typical situation.

I did not check whether mappers have identified thousands of footways and staircases that Vienna-style vehicles are allowed to climb.

yes, 3000 out of 1.5 million highway=steps have a oneway=yes tag, there are also 9000 conveying=yes on steps, maybe the oneway has to do with it and is intended in this way.

What would we gain if we decided that oneway=yes should sometimes apply to pedestrians, as opposed to saying it should never apply to pedestrians? Wouldn’t evaluating this become a nightmare? E.g. someone changing the highway from pedestrian to footway would also significantly change the usability for one direction for pedestrians, if there was also a oneway-tag.

it was there since the beginning, in 2007: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Key:oneway&oldid=55990

I am not a native speaker, but “driving” from my understanding relates to vehicles only.

I don’t know, there are 730,000 highway=footway with bicycle=yes and 85,000 with designated. Many of them look like separately mapped shared use pavements/sidewalks, or pavements with cycle paths (“tracks”) on them. If that’s troll tagging then we have an even bigger problem.

I’ve just spot checked a few highway=footway with oneway=yes with the help of Overpass. Judging from the map, many of them look like shared use pavements or pavements with cycles paths on them, where the oneway tag was used to say that cycling is only allowed in one direction. Many others are in amusement parks, train stations etc. and presumably are true one-way footpaths.

There may be some country-specific differences: the examples I saw in the US when checking with Overpass are nearly all true pedestrian one-ways, the ones in Europe seem to be mostly separately mapped pavements where the oneway tag was meant for bicycles. Not sure why!

In fact StreetComplete is planning to add a quest asking users in Germany to check, for a highway=footway (or path or cycleway) with bicycle=designated if the path is one way for bicycles or not. The plan is to add oneway=yes or no to such ways to express this. There’s even a MapRoulette challenge to systematically replace existing oneway:bicycle with oneway on such paths. This is of course all based on an assumption that there is community consensus that oneway should only apply to vehicles (including bicycles)… if you object to that you might want to comment on the Github issue!

I think we can all agree that oneway=yes or oneway=no can never apply to someone who is not allowed to use the path, and that access tagging should be used to indicate who is allowed to use it.

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This all started because someone helpfully wrote in 2009 that oneway=yes could be considered shorthand for vehicle:forward/backward=no, handwaving about pedestrians. (This is consistent with what @dieterdreist pointed out about “driving”.) If it really is nonsensical in a global context to say that a footway is “one way”, then sure, this definition would be appropriate. It’s counterintuitive to me as an American, but here there’s no concept of a vehicle in the first place.

Interesting. Generally speaking, in the U.S., any time there’s a path and bikes are explicitly allowed on it – and not just tolerated because kids on trikes need to stay out of the street – it’s considered either a bike path or a multi-use path (aka a bike path). So I would expect any analogous situation here to be tagged highway=cycleway. Even then, one-way signs or rules are so rare on bike paths that if one were posted with a standard one-way sign, I’d imagine it would be for a very good reason that would also apply to pedestrians, regardless of the overall traffic laws. The more common scenario would be a painted one-way arrow, but that would apply to all traffic, vehicular or otherwise.

Thanks, I was unaware of either that proposal or the other forum thread. Sorry for taking this thread on even more of a tangent in that case.

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So I have decided to use oneway:foot=yes on the footway leading to the entrance instead of entrance=exit or entrance=entrance because routers seem to not really know which way the exit is and will route you to a place through the exit node.

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This all started because someone helpfully wrote in 2009 that oneway=yes could be considered shorthand for vehicle:forward/backward=no, handwaving about pedestrians. (This is what eventually led to @dieterdreist writing about driving.)

no, it was already written in the first version of oneway in 2007
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Key:oneway&oldid=55990

“ Oneway streets are streets where you are only allowed to drive in one direction. ”

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That would’ve excluded bicycles, which you can only ride, not drive. Bicycles are affected by oneway, yes?

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German uses the same word for both, so that distinction is lost in translation.

Interesting. In Croatia:

  • highway=cycleway (without extra tags) is shorthand for highway=path + access=no + bicycle=designated
  • highway=footway (without extra tags) is shorthand for highway=path + access=no + foot=designated

adding oneway=yes (wiki or not) to either of those can have only one meaning – that the allowed traffic (be it bicycle-only or foot-only) is only allowed in one direction. (any other use of oneway would be obvious nonsense, right? “vehicles here must move in this way, and BTW, no vehicles are allowed at all here”)

Even then, one-way signs or rules are so rare on bike paths that if one were posted with a standard one-way sign, I’d imagine it would be for a very good reason that would also apply to pedestrians, regardless of the overall traffic laws.

Ummm, that sounds completely different here. There are many (if fact, those are majority) of paths that are highway=path + foot=designated + bicycle=designated + segregated=yes, which only allow bicycles in one way (other direction for bicycles might be on other side of the road, or in nearby parallel street, or if you are unlucky, nowhere :face_holding_back_tears:)

If those were tagged with oneway=yes, that would be somewhat ambiguous – but one would (and should, in Croatia case) take that vehicle wording from wiki into consideration, and assume then it is oneway only for bicycles, while pedestrians can go (on their half of the path) in either way.

But still, if one wants to be sure, I’d think it was better to be always explicit in that case (or better yet, in all 3 cases) - i.e. use oneway:bicycle=yes or oneway:foot=yes, instead of oneway=yes

What? Why would anyone ever want to make an effort to change the explicit, precise and clear tag to less-precise, ambiguous, and prone to error tag ?! Just because a highway=path has bicycle=designated does not mean it can’t (already tagged or not yet!) have other access methods (like horse=designated, foot=yes etc.) – and obviously oneway:bicycle=yes would not apply to horses or people!

Do you have link to that Maproulette challenge so one can complain there, @osmuser63783? (searching for oneway returns 4 challenges, but none seem to be about that)

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FWIW, I do agree with you that oneway=yes is ambiguous when used on ways that can be used by non-vehicles (note there are several non-vehicles which are not pedestrians as indicated by foot=yes !)

However, the fact remains that some mappers do seem to map oneway=yes on ways where it (according to its current wiki “vehicles-only” definition) does not make any sense. Thus, they are probably not aware of that definition (or are deliberately vandalizing the map, which I find unlikely).

So the question (as it seems to me) is actually “what are we going to do about it?”:

  • make oneway=* more complex to implement, e.g. by defining that it applies only to vehicles, unless no vehicles are allowed on such way, in which case it applies to whatever access method is allowed. That would solve vast majority of issues with editors tagging thingshighway=footway+oneway=yes, and would require “only” updating few routers and a wiki.
  • insist that oneway=* is only ever to be used for vehicles as defined in the wiki, and that any different usage is tagging mistake and needs to be corrected. That requires changing the wiki to clarify that it also applies to bicycles, kick scooters, hand carts etc. even if one “rides” (or “pushes”/“pulls”) them instead of “driving” then, identifying both people and tools adding such nonsense tags combinations, finding the root case, fixing editors that allow such edits to warn about invalid tagging, finding and updating all data consumers which process oneway=* for non-vehicles, make PRs for QA tools the detect such invalid combination, re-educating all those editors (and tool writers), making semi-automated edits to fix those conflicts as found (depending on feedback what the user actually intended to map, if they remember) – and continue doing all that indefinitely as problems (likely, but hopefully in smaller numbers) continue to arise in the future.
  • doing nothing is worst of both worlds, as it will continue to accrue ambiguous data.
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Not to mention convincing data consumers that this is the correct interpretation and that they’re contributing to confusion:

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It’s here (and limited to Berlin). You can read the full background in the StreetComplete Github issue tracker that I linked to earlier. The idea is basically: if the cycle or shared use path is signed as being oneway, then this applies not just to bicycles, but to all vehicles that are allowed to use it, such as electric scooters, so oneway:bicycle is a tagging mistake (unnecessarily restrictive). Maybe the idea that oneway can’t possible mean pedestrians is long established practice in the German community? I don’t know, I just posted this because I thought it was interesting how divergent the views are.

And I’m afraid I also don’t know if you’re allowed to ride a horse the wrong way down a cycle path in Berlin :sweat_smile: But the idea has given me a chuckle.

  • highway=cycleway (without extra tags) is shorthand for highway=path + access=no + bicycle=designated
  • highway=footway (without extra tags) is shorthand for highway=path + access=no + foot=designated

adding oneway=yes (wiki or not) to either of those can have only one meaning – that the allowed traffic (be it bicycle-only or foot-only) is only allowed in one direction. (any other use of oneway would be obvious nonsense, right? “vehicles here must move in this way, and BTW, no vehicles are allowed at all here”)

there are exceptionally some vehicles on footways and cycleways like maintenance vehicles caring for roadside greenery. access=no also caters for situations where it is really not possible or very dangerous to access, e.g. because of unstable ground/landslides.