Do we have any way of marking a highway=footway as being open for walking only, not running?
I’ve come across a situation where people have their garden estate open to the public, with a walking path around it, but that path is being used by runners, & as such has now also appeared in Strava as a track for runners to follow. The owners are concerned that the runners are damaging the path surface, & have also pushed walkers out of the way, so they would like it marked as not open to runners.
We have cyclists dismount for areas where bikes must be pushed, not ridden, so has anybody seen anything similar for running?
TI has 15 x running=no, but I don’t think that would actually effect anything?
The maxspeed=walk tag has been formally proposed and is being used thousands of times, mostly in Central Europe. However, the only routing engines that support this tag are:
I don’t think that would work well. maxspeed=walk, like other maxspeeds, is generally only assumed to apply to vehicles. highway=living_street implies maxspeed=walk, but there is nothing illegal about people running through a living street.
Shared cycle/footways here, the blue obligatory sign with man|bike in vertical presentation i.e. obligatory, then signed maxspeed=10 (not saying it would apply to maxspeed:bicylce=* (where most push bikes don’t have a speedometer). Me and many barely use them and no law enforcer cares as they (implicitly thru inaction) agree with the folly, does not say that you wont be ticketed when an accident happens. Right across the city line the signing changes to text ‘velocità moderata’ telling pedestrians have right over cycle. That’s doable.
They do quite a bit of nordic walking here on paved ways… they tend to go in a stiff pace.
I’ll keep that not before seen maxspeed=walk in mind… maxspeed:foot=* maybe so the finicky know it’s not about vehicles, zero TI ;o)
In addition to other possible tags, if owner specifically object to some people using that, I’d at least add foot=discouraged (as opposed to foot=permissive such way would have if owners had no objection to people running on foot)
That is however problematic use for a real-world current-usage problem (which this seem to be), as I’m not aware of any ) router actually supporting @ running conditional (or at least majority of popular ones don’t seem to support it AFAICT). And any router not supporting it (which is all of them?) would thus default back to foot=yes, with result that runners would happily run over those ways as if nothing was changed.
I would encourage people to always use safe default (i.e. less problematic one if it is ignored) tag in case when using conditional access, as conditional access will often be ignored (not every app/website supports it, and even those that do, only support some subset of it).
So, if you would use conditional access there, I’d instead recommend something like this:
foot=no
foot:conditional = permissive @ walking
If which case, even if the router ignores that foot:conditional tag, the worst that could happen is that everybody would be directed some less optimal way thus slightly increasing amount of your workout.
Which is IMHO much preferred compared to originally suggested conditional tagging (which would result in friction, people being unhappy, people being yelled at, damage to owners paths, owners possibly deciding to close the path to detriment of everybody etc).
I was literally about to type pretty much exactly what @Matija_Nalis has written, but refreshed the page and saw he’d beaten me to it.
Obviously this depends on the real-world scenario and we don’t know much about that. If it was in the UK, for example, the exact legal status of the path would be relevant.
I don’t claim for this to be universal, but people I know that plan running routes would definitely would not be fine with “just walk that section”. They plan running routes to a spec of specific level of sport activity, oft. have pulse/health activity trackers etc. and slowing down to a walk completely destroys their planned activity.
Of course it depends on the situation, if it is just a few meters, it is fine, but wording above (“garden estate open to the public”) seem to imply to me that it is at least several dozen or even hundreds of meters.
People who don’t care about the sport / activity but just happen to be running because e.g. they’re late might probably be fine with just walking that section of even few hundred meters though (at least if they are traveling much larger distances so the difference in time of arrival is negligible).
Hm, maybe, I’d agree here , at least if it was happening quite often and the detour was significant. IOW router giving you slightly suboptimal route every now and then does not sound like such a deal breaker (to me at least).
On the other hand, routers telling people that they can go where they’re not welcome (or are outright forbidden) is IMHO even more likely to lead people to not use routers - even if it happens much more rarely.
Perhaps use foot=private (as it is private property afterall, and owners can decide - and sounds like are even likely to do so at this point - to completely forbid access there altogether), and that tag value is actually supported by at least several popular routers (e.g. OsmAnd will ask you if you’d like to cross over private ways in this routing session, and such ways will be rendered differently) and adding description=owner gives permission for walking, but running and even pushing bicycle or stroller is forbidden might be better solution?
After all, unless your router allows you to manually specify such details (i.e. not only that you on foot, but that you are running instead of briskly walking) or have specific AI to do that automatically (i.e. current speed + heart rate sensor), even if tag like running=no was widely supported, it would not solve the problem we have here.
Someone running for leisure or exercise probably wouldn’t be relying on a standard pedestrian routing profile for minimizing travel time. After all, these profiles assume a maximum speed that falls within the normal range of human walking speed. If a runner uses a route planner at all, it might include or exclude a no-running section depending on its length. Similarly, if you ask OSRM for a cycling route, it’ll gladly route you over a bicycle=dismount and even the wrong way down a one-way street, presuming that you can walk your bike. (No, it does not support foot=dismount.)
Aside from simple point-to-point routing, some personal goal trackers encourage runners to cover every walkable street in a given city. Maybe a future application could extend this to off-street paths as well. A runner in an urban environment sometimes has to stop and wait for a traffic light, so having to slow down and smell the roses might not be such a bad thing in the grand scheme of things. But if the goal tracker chooses to exclude the garden path, it should be on the basis that it prohibits running, not on the basis that it’s private.
Yes, maxspeed=walk was originally intended for streets, not dedicated footpaths. The prohibition against running in this thread is rare by comparison. Some other vehicle-centric restrictions also end up getting used in non-vehicle routing contexts, such as maxweight on an escalator and maxheight on a footpath. Surely a router wouldn’t assume that maxheight within a pedestrian tunnel only applies to vehicles, but pedestrians need not watch their heads.
Has it not been said that we are not tagging for the router …??..
I understand the problem with this issue is the fact that there are very few tracks worldwide allowing people to walk but not to run or jog or power walk. Would there be thousands of these kinds of track we would have a simple and easy to understand tagging for it like running/jogging/power_walking=no and the routers would most probably respect it.
Creating artistic tags like
foot:conditional=no @ running
or
foot:conditional = permissive @ walking
would not solve the problem imho. Considering the KISS principle I would suggest to use the most simple tag in this case (running/jogging/power_walking=no), as others have done before according to TI and leave it to the routers to respect it.
Not that I know of, no. There is a saying “do not mistag for some_data_consumer” (like renderer, router etc). So e.g. one should not mistag footways that are safe for running with highway=bridleway.
But AFAIK we most definitely do tag for routers, renderers and other data consumers. In fact, I think that it is the whole point of the project
I wouldn’t really know how many are there (I’ve only ever encountered a few instances in my city, but it’s not something I look out for); but the fact that majority of paths do allow running, I’d say it makes it even more important to mark those that do not (after all, if the ratio was in the range of 50-50, people would not assume that running is allowed and thus be annoyed when they find out it isn’t).
I generally agree with KISS and specially for popular cases, but as note yourself, we are already deep into special-case territory with running as such, and *:conditional was made specifically to deal with such special cases. And what if running is only forbidden in some seasons, or hours of the day etc. - (see e.g. usage for foot:conditional for similar example).
And if one has to support foot:conditional anyway (as one would hope for good running router), also having additional tag running=* does not make it simpler.
Anyway, whatever people choose to use (I have no horse in that race, just wanted to note other possible alternative) I would encourage them to document it on the wiki (and link to appropriate pages like foot=* and access=*).
Sometimes it even ends up being multiple things, even if settling on one of them would be nicer (see e.g. pedestrian lanes for particularly diverse example where people can’t agree - but documenting all different ways to tag them is still quite useful reference IMO)
Scotland actually, which I believe makes it even worse?
2.5km circuit!
& that is what they are considering.
Also mentioned that they have posted No Running signs, only for them to be torn down, as it shows on Strava as a running path, which obviously over-rides any physical sign!
If it’s open land then people can run across it no matter what the landowner says.
If it’s “sufficient adjacent land” to a building (usually taken as the house’s garden), then it’s up to the landowner. Given that it’s described as a “garden estate”, I suspect para 3.16 of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code applies, which is best described as “it’s complicated”.
TBH I wonder if the most practical course of action is for the landowner to contact Strava. They have a whole “flagging” thing and I have no idea how it works but…
Good suggestion, although that obviously would only affect those who use Strava to make their routes (which I guess is probably not everyone - I understands their frustration, but correlation does not imply causation: for example, the Stvara running path might be so popular there because OSM is telling everyone to go there and Strava users are doing it as does everybody else, i.e. Strava could be the symptom rather than the cause of the problem. Or it could be other way around. Or, most probably, both are contributors to the problem)
If people however use OSM data to plan route (which I understood this thread to be about), then some other (OSM-based, obviously) solution is likely needed (and if they use some other data source, yet another solution - but then it is not our problem anymore, eh?).
If I were such owner, I’d wait ready and then start jogging with other runners when they enter the property (because stopping them for a chat would likely not go well - see previous post), and then start up friendly conversation to find out what app they use for planning their runs, and then home in on the culprit once I had significant statistical sample. (only half joking)
How does the path appear in Strava - does it have a segment associated with it? If so, then the segment could be flagged.
There is sport=running so perhaps we need a negated version of that? After all, many council estates have signs saying no ball games, though I am not sure how you’d tag that.
