Gate or entrance?

General talk
1

Hi

I’ve been working on a college that has a fence to the front, a long thin yard about 3 metres deep, and then the entrance.

Whenever the main entrance is open for business, the gate is also open.

Do I mark this as a gate, as an entrance, or not at all?

Currently I’ve called both of these entrances. Inconsistently, I’ve called the gate at the back (north) of the site a gate, because there’s no entrance nearby.

Thanks for any help!

https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit#map=18/52.57684/-0.23642

2

I assume this refers to: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5962227764#map=19/52.57639/-0.23715&layers=D

I would only tag the building door as an entrance. I would tag the gate as a gate. If it were the primary entrance to the campus, I might consider using both barrier and entrance.

I would also map the fence, using the same nodes as the relevant part of the amenity boundary, and I would either map a way leading from the public road, through the gate, or, if there is no specific path, map the relevant part of the grounds as being a pedestrian area.

3

Thanks, that’s very helpful.

The result when you look at the lines on the map isn’t a very good representation of the reality on the ground, because roads appear to have no thickness. (It’s only at a close zoom that you see the disparity.)

Presumably this doesn’t matter? It’s just diagrammatic.

EDIT: see here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/633823348

4

The map is the database, not a particular rendering of that database. You can add the width of the path as a width attribute (don’t do that on the one for connectivity from the road, as that is only needed because the road is also only coded as its centre line.**). However,I’m not aware of any map renderer that makes use of widths on highway=footway.

(You can also map the path as area=yes. but, in my view, that is over-mapping, and most routers don’t really understand how to route across areas.)

Incidentally, you should use access for the foot access to footways, not no access with a separate foot access. Also, although possibly debatable, I would say access=private here, as I presume you need to be a member of the college to have permission to use the path. (In the real world there are far more shades of access right than OSM encodes.)

** There is an interesting question as to whether the width attribute for a vehicle highway includes the sidewalks. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:width#Pedestrian_area