Pedestrian lane on the road

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Thanks, added extra taginfo and sorted on:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Sidewalks#As_a_pedestrian_lane_on_the_road

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Whatever works best, to be honest. I’d do it as a separate way if it’s necessary to do so for topological purposes, but for a “normal roadside footpath” I’d do it as a tag on the road as it’s easier to do initially and easier to maintain. If someone’s already mapped something as a separate way I’d leave it like that, unless it was obviously wrong in some way.

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Earlier, it was proposed that we should map a pedestrian lane marked off by paint as sidewalk:right=lane based on a functional understanding of “sidewalk”. Because sidewalk=* and footway=sidewalk are often used in conjunction and seen as two representations of the same concept, it was suggested that the same infrastructure could be mapped as a separate highway=footway with footway=sidewalk. The separate way implies physical separation. But because footway=sidewalk was approved specifically for physically separate infrastructure and that’s how data consumers interpret it, there have been suggestions to erase that aspect of a sidewalk by:

Any data consumer that currently understands sidewalk=* or footway=sidewalk would need to carve out some new logic for dealing with this new tagging scheme. Note that none of this discussion pertains to whether pedestrian traffic is allowed on a street; that would be the responsibility of access tags.

On the other hand, if the suggestion is that sidewalk=lane is completely unrelated to mapping separate footway=sidewalk ways, then we would need to contend with edge cases such as a pedestrian lane beside a sidewalk, also called a sidewalk extension. Would sidewalk:right=* require two values, either lane;yes or lane;separate, depending on mapping style?

Contrast this with the alternative approach, that a pedestrian lane is not a sidewalk after all. According to this view, some wiki pages about sidewalks have inaccurate examples, but these pages have been pretty fluid anyways. Meanwhile, it’s consistent with the approval for footway=sidewalk.

I’m assuming that no mapper and no software treats a way as a footway just because it is tagged footway=*, ignoring the highway=* value, just as no one treats a way as a cycleway just because it is tagged cycleway=*. Otherwise, we’ve got a big problem with roadways tagged cycleway=lane and shared_lane. The footway=* documentation describes the key as iterative refinement because that’s how the footway=sidewalk and footway=crossing proposals used it, but neither proposal defined footway=* as exclusively for iterative refinement.

I recognize that I’m arguing for footway=* to be a homonymous key, but that’s already the case with cycleway=*, so if anything it would be surprising if footway=* did not have homonyms.

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If the vote for pedestrian_lane=* had been held at time of the vote for footway=sidewalk, it would have been approved. If the vote for footway=sidewalk had been held at time of vote for pedestrian_lane=* it would have been rejected.

Looking at usage, pedestrian lanes are conceived of as sidewalks (in the sense of the term that never went to vote) slightly more often than as footpaths.

I consider the damage from mapping them as sidewalks with no kurb (a monster of BE/AE) less than the damage than mapping them as footways (in the OSM meaning), that are lanes instead.

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Thanks! But the first two cases as I understood them have nothing to do with footway=sidewalk (indeed, whole point of using them is that highway=footway is not mapped as separate way at all, so of course there would be no footway=sidewalk on that nonexistent highway=footway either).
And third case is just strange suggestion (with ton of problems), and didn’t get any traction as far as I can see.

On the other hand, if the suggestion is that sidewalk=lane is completely unrelated to mapping separate footway=sidewalk ways

That is how I understood it, yes. In fact, it looked so obvious, that it didn’t even occur to me that someone might understand it differently. I’ve now tried to clarify that more explicitly in the wiki - thanks for notifying about not-perfectly-clear situation! :heart: Let me know if it is clear now.

then we would need to contend with edge cases such as a pedestrian lane beside a sidewalk, also called a sidewalk extension. Would sidewalk:right=* require two values, either lane;yes or lane;separate, depending on mapping style?

  • if regular kerb-sidewalk was already mapped as separate highway=footway way, I wouldn’t do anything more
  • if there was no separate way, but just highway=residential, I’d tag it with sidewalk=yes

The reasoning is that I map for usefulness. So such “sidewalk extensions” don’t really matter to me.
As an example of my reasoning, if I’m a cyclist (to stick with known terminology/tagging), and there is trunk road with:

  • bicycle sharrows, a gravel verge, and a separate asphalt cycleway track :arrow_forward: I’d just tag that existing highway=trunk only with cycleway:right=track + cycleway:right:surface=asphalt (or alternatively draw that cycleway as separate way if I wanted to add more attributes like smoothness,lit,segregated etc. on it). As that is the best option for cyclist, I as cyclist (nor routers) wouldn’t care much about less-useful options that may be available.
  • bicycle sharrows and a gravel verge, but nothing more :arrow_forward: I’d just tag that highway=primary with cycleway:right=shared_lane. As that is the best option for cyclist here.
  • just a gravel verge, but nothing more :arrow_forward: I’d tag verge=right + verge:surface=gravel + verge:width=2. Because that is the best option for cyclist here: however bad it might be, it’s better than being suicidal, and will do until better ways are reached.

The same reasoning I would apply to surfaces available for pedestrians (however we may decide to call them) - I’d map the best available one (probably via simple StreetComplete click) and call it a day. If there was a regular sidewalk with kerb and such pedestrian lane extension, only the better kerb-sidewalk would be mapped by me.
I wouldn’t waste time describing other options in a Note (even with a picture), or opening Vespucci for doing a full-fledged edit of all possible options (which would not only waste more time, but the resulting tagging would be more likely to confuse routers and other data consumers than actually help)

I wouldn’t be so sure. In software, the easiest option will often get used, even if it is not the best one. Anecdotal evidence: I use similar approach all the time in my overpass queries (such behaviour is even promoted by overpass itself, because, contrary to how most other data-processing things like SQL/pipes/etc work, in overpass adding additional restrictions in order to reduce dataset actually make the query much slower, instead of faster – I kid you not! It’s even documented somewhere, but I can’t find it right now)

Well, in this thread, I hope only to document how it is currently used (and even that is at a limit of my capacity). If someone decides to make an effort and use that summary as a stepping stone towards a proposal for better way (be it creating a new scheme, or modifying existing one), it would be great! I’d certainly try to participate in that discussion, but I equally certainly wouldn’t be the one volunteering to do the brunt of the work there (truth be told, had I expected this one to turn out so popular, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it :smile: - but now the duty bounds me to finish what I have started :books: :rescue_worker_helmet: )

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I’m not so sure about that. Separately mapped sidewalk ways have become significantly more popular among both mappers and software developers in the years since the approval of footway=sidewalk, but I don’t think the approval was the decisive factor. The proposal made presets, QA tools, imports, and router optimizations more likely, but I suspect a lot of that would’ve happened anyways.

Perhaps that would be true if we simultaneously require an unprotected pedestrian lane (that is, one without bollards or other barriers) to be tagged on the roadway and never mapped as a separate way. But mapping an unprotected pedestrian lane as a separate way that violates the physical separation rule would create problems. For one thing, a router would never be able to instruct you to cross the painted white line. It’s no different than if someone decides they’d rather map car lanes as separate ways.

Assuming we aren’t pushing to relax the physical separation rule, we should avoid dissonance between the meaning of sidewalk=* and footway=sidewalk to the extent possible. They may be syntactically different and correspond to different highway=* values, but there’s already enough confusion about what counts as a sidewalk without it meaning two different things depending on context.

I would quibble with the wiki’s current characterization of footway=lane:

Most often used as a property of separately mapped highway=footway, which is problematic since one shouldn’t use separate OSM ways for lanes which are not physically separated. But there is small number of cases where footway=* is mapped as a property of the road like highway=residential - that is however also problematic, because it fails documented Key:footway requirement that it should only be used as a refinement of highway=footway.

Unless I’ve gotten my OverpassQL wrong (entirely possible), only 30% of footway:*=lane are on highway=footway; the rest are on other kinds of highway, and regardless this tag is very lightly used overall. As I pointed out above, the wiki doesn’t require that footway=* only be used for iterative refinement of highway=footway; it just points that out as a matter of fact, because of the approved proposal for two values of that key. If individual approved values of a key automatically hold a monopoly on the key’s meaning, then that’s another reason we needn’t vote to approve historic=*. :wink:

It sounds like you’re focusing on a router’s basic need to find a suitable route, which is understandable. But for better or worse, routers such as Valhalla also allow users to decide how much or little they want to use the street versus a sidewalk versus a dedicated path. Moreover, renderers and analysis tools such as A/B Street need to produce a realistic layout of the streetscape based on the available ways and tags. As a mapper, I’m not in a great position to decide which infrastructure the router or renderer should know about and which it should be oblivious to. Sometimes none of that infrastructure is particularly useful anyways.

The repositories of GraphHopper, OSRM, Valhalla, and the rest make pretty clear that it’s highway=footway, not footway=*, that makes a footway. I would be surprised to find a major editor or renderer that styles a bare footway=* as a footway. Do you know of any? Since footway=* without highway=footway is so rare, we have an opportunity to define the meaning of that combination, which is otherwise nonsensical.

Like you, I often skip prerequisite tags when forming Overpass queries in hopes of a faster query. (It probably avoids unnecessary JOINs under the hood.) But if I want to count all the footways, regardless of type, I’m much more likely to query for highway=footway than footway=*. highway=footway is what Overpass turbo’s wizard produces for "foot path", thanks to iD’s “Foot Path” preset.

But let’s suppose you couldn’t query for highway=footway or exclude footway=lane for some reason. If querying for footway=* turns up too many false-positive non-footways, that would be an argument against this style of iterative refinement. Rather, it suggests that we should be prefixing the secondary keys, as in highway:footway=sidewalk or footway:type=sidewalk. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

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That’s not what I was saying. A sidewalk, for me, is always physically separated, so if a cycleway runs on a sidewalk, we tag it as cycleway=track and never cycleway=lane. So theoretically, since I consider a sidewalk an infrastructural element of a road, instead of cycleway:left=track, you could also say cycleway:left=sidewalk. But I’m not proposing to do this, this is just do show that for cycleways, we consider sidewalks as separate tracks, so we should do the same for footways: if they are physically separate, they are a sidewalk, if not, they are a lane. Yes, there are cases where the footway runs on the shoulder, or the verge, but I’m currently focussing on sidewalks.

Oh boy, let’s not get into language nitpicking. Sidewalk is already an American term in a British-language-dominated environment. I’m proposing to differentiate between a sidewalk as a physical structure (or pavement, or whatever you wanna call it), and a footway as the way where pedestrians walk. And I’m not proposing to do that, because language A uses it like this, but because it makes sense to have a distinction.

If 99% of all sidewalks are physically separated by kerbs and height (not saying that’s true for all countries, but the ones I went to are all like this), it makes a lot of sense to agree that sidewalk=left means: on the left side is a physical infrastructure for pedestrians, physically separated by kerb and maybe height. It’s designated for pedestrians, but sometimes bicycles can ride on it as well. Simply, because 99% of the current usage of sidewalk is identical to this definition.

The problem we’re facing when this physical infrastructure is missing, is exactly what @Minh_Nguyen said: we can now start to map footways that are actually lanes line this:

sidewalk:left=yes
sidewalk:left:surface=asphalt
sidewalk:left:kerb=no
sidewalk:left:separation=no
sidewalk:left:marking=solid_line

Or we just agree that this is troll-tagging, because we’re just undoing physical separation. Instead, we could use, as suggested as well, something like footway:<side>=* to just point out where pedestrians are supposed to walk, completely ignoring that it means the same thing as sidewalk or pavement in some languages and that there might be better words for it.

Still with me? So in the case that sidewalk=* in OSM defines a physical structure and footway=* defines where pedestrians are supposed to walk, sidewalk:left=yes would imply footway:left=sidewalk, because if there’s a sidewalk, the pedestrians are supposed to walk on it (again: different countries, different rules, but you get the idea). But if there is no physically separated sidewalk, we could just say footway:left=lane to mean: there’s a special lane for pedestrians on the carriageway. If there isn’t even such a separated way and you have shared space, then footway=carriageway could be used to point that out, which could be the default for the absence of a physically separated sidewalk (e.g. sidewalk=no).

If your issue with my definition is the use of footway=*, we might as well just use pedestrian=* or whatever other word - I actually don’t care. I just used it to demonstrate what I am trying to suggest:

  • treat sidewalk=* as the presence/absence of a physically separated sidewalk with kerb and raised (or whatever the country’s default is) level
  • treat footway=* or pedestrian=* as a way to say where on the road pedestrians are supposed to be. To me, something like footway=shoulder makes a lot of sense, much as footway=lane. sidewalk=lane would not fit in the schema I’m suggesting.

Since everyone has a different opinion on this, I don’t want to force this onto anyone. But if you really think that sidewalk=left just means: there is some form of way, physically separated or not, for pedestrians on the left side of the road, then how do you distinguish between a physical separation and a soft one?
Are you putting sidewalk:left:separation=kerb + sidewalk:left:kerb=raised on all your roads? Really?

Note that I might sound angry, but that’s only because I’m suffering from a language barrier. I’m angry at me for being unable to carry across what I want to say.

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Still with me? So in the case that |sidewalk=| in OSM defines a
physical structure and |footway=| defines where pedestrians are
supposed to walk, |sidewalk:left=yes| would /imply/

footway:left=sidewalk|, because if there’s a sidewalk, the pedestrians
are supposed to walk on it (again: different countries, different rules,
but you get the idea). But if there is no physically separated sidewalk,
we could just say |footway:left=lane| to mean: there’s a special lane
for pedestrians on the carriageway.

The systematically correct way to say that would be foot:right and
foot:left. There is access right for transport mode foot on this
carriageway, but under the condition to use one or two of certain
special lanes.

That is totally in line with other transport modes, where most often
users are allowed to use about one half of the existing lanes. The right
hand side ones or the left hand side ones.

These tags are indeed used that way, although to very low volume.

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You put it better than I did. :slightly_smiling_face:

Popular cycleway=* values point to additional options, such as footway=shoulder, footway=sidepath, and footway=shared, that seem elegant enough to me. Really, the odd one out is sidewalk=*.

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What you are both suggesting is a tagging scheme where footway is used as an additional tag on highway to specify where pedestrians walk, like cycleway is used on a highway to specify where you cycle, and its values, from sidewalk, lane, and shoulder to no indicate how good the pedestrian infrastructure is. The tag sidewalk would be reserved for a typical, “proper” sidewalk.

Some data about current usage:
footway=* is used 2,309 times on roads, plus footway:left=* 499 times, plus footway:right=* 713 times, in total there are 3,349 roads with at least one of these tags. (1,016 of them also have a sidewalk tag.) By roads here I mean a way that also has a highway tag, with a value from residential to motorway.

The most common values for footway (including its variants :left and :right) when used on roads are:

sidewalk    1627.0
yes          755.0
track        534.0
no           139.0
path         129.0
crossing     106.0
lane          91.0
sidepath      33.0
separate      19.0
none          15.0

What were people trying to say when they added footway=* to a highway=residential? I’m not sure. Maybe some people had the sort of tagging scheme in mind that you’re proposing here. Maybe some got mixed up and meant sidewalk=*. Maybe in some of these usages, we’re actually looking at a separately mapped footway and the presence of the highway tag is just a mistake. In any case, I think it’s worth looking at the data (Overpass query) of how this combination is already used.

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Note: In contrast to previous discussion where I’ve tried to stay neutral and only collect information to document, while asking for clarifications and opinions of different points of view, in this post I’d like to express my personal opinion (backed by some hopefully universally accepted authorities). Please note that I do not wish to make anyone more angry by that, and that everyone is quite free to disagree - I’d just prefer if that disagreement was supported by some external references. Regardless of that opinion of mine, I hope I’ve managed to collect and document opinions and tags in use, even those I don’t personally approve of. :heart:

TL;DR: “separation by kerb / gutter / strip of grass are just a common case for sidewalks, not a requirement.”

I’m glad you’re not proposing it, as it seems like a bad idea. About the only thing I think everybody agreed in this thread is that sidewalk means a “surface designated for movement of pedestrians”. They disagree on how it should look, must it be separated by kerb or not, how to tag it, etc, but everybody seems to agree that it is for pedestrians. cycleway, on the other hand, is for bicycles (hopefully that is also generally accepted definition). Bicycles are not pedestrians. Thus, cycleway=sidewalk variants are a bad idea in itself. (And especially as it seems to be motivated by misguided idea that “sidewalk” must mean “physically-separated-by-kerb-or-similar”, which I’ll try to debunk below).

Yes, I think I understood that specific point of view that you seem to hold.
However, I think you’re wrong in this assumption of yours. Here is why I think so, by searching most popular and available online dictionaries on the web for “sidewalk”:

None of them mention such requirement of separation by e.g. kerb/curb. If “separated by kerb” (or whatever) was such a principal part of the definition of “sidewalk”, one would surely hope that some of them would at least mention it in passing, right? (I swear I didn’t handpick those dictionaries, they are just most popular dictionaries which I’ve been able to find online! Feel free to suggest additional ones to add in the list)

And if one does search deep enough, we do finally find it mentioned:

  • Century dictionary (via wordnik aggregator): “A footwalk by the side of a street or road; specifically, a paved or otherwise prepared way for pedestrians in a town, usually separated from the roadway by a curb and gutter. Also (in Great Britain nearly always) called pavement.”

  • vocabulary.com: “A sidewalk is a paved path for walking, often alongside a road. If your neighborhood has sidewalks, it’s easier and safer to take a little jog.
    While English speakers in other parts of the world might use words like footpath or pavement instead, North Americans typically use sidewalk. Most sidewalks are slightly higher than the street and are often separated from them by a curb or a strip of grass. There is some historical evidence that Ancient Greece had sidewalks, though the word itself dates from about 1740.”

(emphasis mine). And even those dictionaries that mention kerb/curb says that kerb & gutter & strip of grass are just a common case for sidewalks, not a requirement.

Now, I don’t want to impinge on your beliefs or tell you what you have to think, but maybe you’d like to consider all that evidence listed above as a sign that your personal definition of “sidewalk” might benefit from slight revision (or at least from more research, if you don’t trust my sources)?

So far, in contrast to all those dictionaries listed above, I’ve only seen in this thread anecdotal evidence that children books in USA have always depicted sidewalks as having a curb. I don’t want to dispute that, in fact I find it quite probable and understandable - they’re written for children, and they will thus probably only show the most common case.
E.g. I’d wager that those same children books under “light bulb” show pictures of Incandescent light bulb (as that was the most common case when most of those children books were written - although that picture might have started to change in last decade). Yet I hope that people will accept that it possible to also have lightbulb=CFL or lightbulb=LED in addition to lightbulb=incandescent (paraphrasing, as those are probably not real OSM tags)

I’d better stop here, then :smile_cat: This whole sub-thread seems to be based on language nitpicking that “sidewalk must have a kerb and thus currently-most-popular-tagging sidewalk:left=lane is just an impossible language construct!”. (which happens to be invalid nitpicking, in my opinion documented with dictionary links above)

As shown it that previous post, common OSM usage of highway=footway tag is waaay bigger abuser of English language than sidewalk:left=lane could ever be. (in fact, in my opinion sidewalk:left=lane is entirely correct usage of English, because, as hopefully well-documented above, sidewalk need not have a kerb (or other physical separation) at all.)

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That is my main beef with footway=sidewalk on a highway=footway. For whom is a line so much different than a kerb, that one makes a separate entity and the other does not? Certainly, it is not the motorists. It is not average pedestrians neither, nor the blind. It is not the engineers neither, which was the whole point of the dubious gallery, that got mentioned above.

Another then iD maintainer actually advised to to just that, mapping lanes separately - the case was about the validator suggesting to use railway crossings for embedded tram.

I do not think wiki quibbling will be of much use: footway=lane lends itself so much to refine a highway=footway, all wiki will be futile.

A term as pedestrian_lane does not suffer from this deficit. It is a pity it dit not get approved. Because everybody knows better.

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There have been numbeeous safety studies proving that barriers and seperated paths reduce the likelihood of serious injuries. Kerbs or other barriers often blunt the force otherwise directed at neatby pedestrians. Although less effective, a physical breaks in the road can slow or reaglin the wheels of a drifting vehicle. Jarring the vehicle enough that a distracted or sleepy driver might realize that something is wrong and attempt to recover control of their vehicle. Resulting in likely sideswipe instead of a head on collision where all the vehicle’s momentumis directed at the pedestrians. In either case, the additional infrastructure might be the difference between receiving minor injuries or being rushed to the emergency room.

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Almost of your definitions uses “footpath”, meaning it’s most likely distinctive, which can be interpreted as physically separated. By “usually” divided by kerb, gutter, or grass, they can still be separated by other barriers.

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I wholeheartedly agree that a sidewalk does not necessarily need to be separated from the roadway by a curb. Indeed, the stereotypical rural or small-town configuration is a sidewalk separated from the roadway by a strip of landscaping rather than a curb. In the interest of brevity, an American English dictionary would be quite unlikely to raise both possibilities explicitly, because there’s such a zoo of local words for that strip. Most speakers are quite familiar with the concept but have no word for it. (OSM calls it a verge. My dialect calls it a “berm”, maybe. Any word you like.)

But what all these definitions make clear is that the sidewalk sits beside the roadway, apart from it somehow, not within it. Contrast this with the definition of “lane” that you’ll find in each of these dictionaries. The gallery at issue earlier in this thread had been changed to call into question whether a sidewalk could really be separated from a roadway by a verge – even questioning our competency as mappers to identify these as sidewalks on our own. The confusion this causes is not theoretical; it’s something local mappers ask me to clarify on a regular basis.

English is a language without a language authority. (What were we thinking, making it the lingua franca of tagging? :man_facepalming:) These dictionaries are great for acing a spelling bee or winning a friendly disagreement at the bar, but if I were attempting to appeal to authority, I would’ve cited a traffic engineering textbook or legal code. I have no intention of constraining OSM’s tagging model in this manner. My point was only that there is ample room for confusion and an opportunity to mitigate it somewhat going forward.

I’m not quite sure what you mean. Perhaps you’re unconvinced that a curb amounts to a barrier? Around here, a curb is normally built just tall and steep enough to physically deter a car from riding up onto the sidewalk. That isn’t always the case, but it’s true often enough that most motorists don’t get tempted to snake around traffic using the sidewalk (though I’ve seen it done before). Besides, not every barrier is insurmountable to pedestrians; barrier=bollard and barrier=chain come to mind.

Or if you’re unconvinced about the physical separation principle, all I can say is that that’s what virtually all OSM-based routers fundamentally depend on when creating a routing graph.

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I’ve never said it was the official definition of a sidewalk in English, and also that the definition will likely vary from country to country. I was suggesting that OSM defines the tag sidewalk=* to indicate the presence of a physically separated way for pedestrians. To a lot of people, walking on a lane as shown in the first picture, is a scary ting to do, especially, if you push a pram.
I did not base this on any dictionary or whatsoever, just simply on the fact that in the majority of places I went to, sidewalks already are physically separate structures 99% of the time. Meaning 99% of OSM’s uses of sidewalk=both will very likely correlate with this and refer to physically separated sidewalks.
In my opinion, we don’t have to base our definition of sidewalk on any official British or American English definition. It would be great to have a proper definition and not the current “this road has some space for pedestrians to move on”, because this isn’t helpful at all. But I’m not going to elaborate this any further, I think I’ve made my point now.

94

To a lot of people, walking on a lane as shown in the first picture, is a scary ting to do, especially, if you push a pram.

this is getting offtopic, but actually it is irrational thinking because with modern wankpanzers (and old school lorries) a raised kerb will not protect you much better on the sidewalk than a lane marking.

e.g. recent article https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-04-04/editorial-hulking-suvs-and-trucks-are-deadly-to-pedestrians-why-arent-regulators-pushing-for-safer-models

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Some thoughts:

  • sidewalk=* was adapted from footway=* quite a few years ago, see Proposed features/Footway - OpenStreetMap Wiki and Proposed features/Sidewalk - OpenStreetMap Wiki. The advantage of using sidewalk=* on the main road is that it is less confusion with highway=footway plus defining footway=* only as subtag of highway=footway. By the way, I find similar mixed use for cycleway=* in the mean time which is not perfect either, in my opinion.
  • We have cycleway=lane and cycleway=track. Only the latter can be mapped separately leading to cycleway=separate. Similar is used with sidewalk=* so in my eyes sidewalk=lane would fill the gap to describe such sidewalks without physical barriers (kerb, grass, …).
  • Lanes tagging is usually only additional data to better define the layout but it does not super-seed the simple tagging, like cycleway=lane.
  • Safety perspectives are usually hard to measure and often subjective. I usually cannot tell weather a cycleway=lane or cycleway=track is safer as there are too many factors to consider, like width, sharp bends or sudden intersections, and it also depends on the driver. We need more tags to describe the safeness like bicycle:class.
  • Last but not least, we will always face wording which won’t fit 100% with lexicons but we have the wiki to describe the proper meaning and users should just get used to read it more often than simply relying on a single word which might be even a bad translation, see https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/stable-only-for-horses.
96

Well, ish - what OSM calls a verge is what British English calls a verge - there’s no guarantee that there’s a “sidewalk” (a “footpath” in British English) on the other side of it. Some our our streets aren’t quite as wide as yours :slight_smile:

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97

No argument there, and it’s the same over here too.