Pedestrian lane on the road

Help and support Tagging help & support
, ,
95

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.