I’d like to first give an example of a living_street
There pedestrians can walk wherever they want, on its main section central is a tram line, two car lines, that are disallowed to cross the tram line and on sides there is 1 footway south and 2 lines of footways north. Additionally the fotways are connected in some arbitrary places through the street,
because routers would fail to route somewhat direct route to destination
There area=yes
highway=pedestrian
is quite nice to use, because it connects all shops/cafe/etc entrances so it’s possible to navigate to em, but still, not directly, because even though it’s a line, we never found out how to make advantage of it with technical limitations that we have got (I’d like to try elaborate on proposal on that later, but something else might take priority… )
Also, because it’s a living_street
it was designed flat as a table and there are no kerbs sticking out anywhere more than ~5milimeters
So, why do we map 6 separate lines and connect its sidewalks arbitrary in a few perpendicular spots, while we can map just one line for the street and tag it.
So it looks that even though we have got tags for those sidewalks we rarely use em and map separate sidewalks instead and we add those perpendicular ones as well to solve our routing problem the best we can atm.
Ask yourself a question why do we map em separate even tho the kerb is levelled and you can ride with roller skates anywhere you want across the street and all vehicles has to yeld to you, so there is really no restriction.
I put that question, coz now I’d like to talk about modern cycleways,
that look virtually exactly like a street for cars, only it’s not that wide, but of course it has sidewalks for pedestrians and tagging them can be found in this post. But those sidewalks are not separated from cycleway by a big kerb, but it’s levelled instead to avoid crashing on the kerb or to allow smoothy roll over to grass in an emergency. Those cycleways as described in the S5 section od Bicycle wiki
If a road like this is straight, starts from nowhere and ends nowhere special as well, there really is no reason to use the controversial variant of two lines because the only information we are loosing is not being able to tell which side is the cycleway in relation to line direction (but that could be fixed with proposal of tags described roughly in forum post i linked earlier )
But in the cities, where we have got lots of intersections and footways intersecting cycleways in suggested spaces as well, the two line controversial variant is currently the only solution to map this complex system.
This is especially important for routers and two line mapping is perfectly understandable to any router without any additional specifications we have to develop.
I’d like to give examples from google street view, but don’t know if i’m allowed, so i will describe a few of em, though I’d love to attach screenshots or link (whichever is allowed)
-
Routers can calculate where there are collisions and how many of em.
if a footway intersects with another footway, but without phisical connection to the cycleway, this is important information impossible to map by single line -
Because we don’t know how to take advantage of area highways for routers, the best we can do is intersect footway with a cycleway in the actual suggested nodes and not anywhere on the single mapped line
-
When cycleway and footway crosses themselves, for pedestrians to walk to a bus platform next to a street, then it can do so in two ways
- pedestrians have to yeld to cyclicts
- cyclists have to yeld to pedestrians
- While right now it might be a little unclear as to which tags to use there, basucally here in Poland, cycleway is
apshalt
and footway ispaving_stones
, so if footway takes the lead, it’s surface is uninterrupted and crossing kerbs is mapped for cycleway, but if it’s the cycleway, thenasphalt
maintain continuity and so kerbs are mapped for the footway
- While right now it might be a little unclear as to which tags to use there, basucally here in Poland, cycleway is
-
Kerbs. Those, can be
flush
with markedtactile_paving
for footways andflush
or none at all for cycleways when entering a crossing over a car street. Kerbs can be drawn as a line, but for routings those has to be tagged on node of ahighway
and i focus on those. -
tactile_paving
are rarely marked here over a crossing through a car street, but those can be added across a cycleway and it’s clear information for cyclist that in this spot they gotta yeld -
tactile_paving
are tagged for a footway, not just its nodes, so that’s also a reason why it need to a be a separate line from a cycleway -
pedestrian and cycling crossings have different marking here in Poland and it’s disallowed by law to place em on the same space and they always have to be separate. While there are tags for that, that’s not the case with information about
tactile_paving
that it’s only for zebra location -
Also, in favor of two line mapping, i have asked on a small cycling group where the’re very familiar with planning a route and navigating on the fly from a map. I have given 2 screnshots and without describing i asked to pick only one.
9/10 people picked a rendering with two separate lines. and 1/10 picked one where it’s just one line, even tho it looked like a cycleway.
I tell this, because:- maybe we want easy mapping and mapping 2 separate lines is harder - that’s just wrong to me
- maybe we think that mapping one merged line is better for people, coz they know that its kerbs are lowered and it’s easy to switch sides anywhere over it easly, but we just assume this, even tho consumers of our mapping don’t even mention it as relevant, coz likely that’s not an information they see anywhere.
- maybe end point users seeing one line simply assumes it’s always a mixed traffic, while two lines is segregated and that’s the trully valuable information.
Please give your feedback on this kind of micromapping and feel free to describe how much different it is in your country and give examples!
One of mine example is around this area, whiere in this certain spot cyclists have to yeld to pedestrians
Also i’m not implying that cycleways/footways should be now mapped always as twoliners. Mapping two lines is micromapping. We don’t always have time or sources for that, so any mapping is always better than no mapping at all.
But removing micromapped details and making it ambiguous for routers just for the rules sake is not useful.