Being not so much time ago in Lithuania and fixing outdated stuff on my travels where ever I went, I got stumbled upon one thing there. One of the lithuanian mappers informed me that they have agreed on one rule for mapping sidewalks. Sidewalks are mapped explicitly by separate path only if sidewalk is physically separaed by whichever barrier, in other cases main path (secondary road, tetriary road, etc) they add sidewalk tags to the main path.
Do we have such rules about paths in Estonia mapping community?
Best regards!
I don’t remember encountering any Estonia-specific rules.
Regarding this exact rule - mostly I see people mapping sidewalks separately and I don’t have any problem with this. This allows easier tagging for disabled and also makes these ways visible on most of the maps, while sidewalks on main thoroughfare are usually not shown.
Care should be taken to allow bicycle routing on crossings if they are between paths where bicycles are allowed and not to have duplicated sidewalk mapped both separately and on main thoroughfare.
Similar thing - did you know that you can map parking on the highway itself? No one does it, people micromap parking separately.
I knew about parking on the side but still doing it separately. Its more visually readable in OSM and other map renderers. The much easier readability is a benefit on its own already while being more work. Its not a problem per se, the micromapping, but coming from as a normal user before started mapping myself, it was much better to use OSM and other map renderers when stuff was separately mapped. Map was very easily readable and you did not to look extra stuff up. More effort upfront for the mapper, less effort for the user in the end, prehaps even for mapper later on.
Anyway, then there is much work to do with sidewalks on the main path because there are a lot of places where sidewalk is mapped separately…
Then again, should we start mapping separate sidewalks when main path is already tagged with sidewalk tag? This is mostly regarding city center of Tallinn where I recall this being the case where main path has sidewalk tag and sidewalk is not yet separately mapped.
I personally don’t see any harm in this. Maybe there are cases when sidewalk is really narrow or it would create clutter. There is also a problem of routing requiring fake connections in places where you can just step down from the curb. But overall, if you want to, why not?