Pedestrian lane on the road

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Nothing short of a reinforced concrete wall will completely eliminate any risk to pedestrians, but then that wouldn’t be a sidewalk anyways. :wink: A less imposing curb or row of flexible bollards balances the need to separate cars and pedestrians with the need to access abutters by car. True, it doesn’t protect against the most egregious reckless driving. Neither does a roundabout completely prevent collisions, yet they’re getting shipped over here from Europe in record numbers, because they tend to minimize collisions to an acceptable degree.

Another, more prosaic reason many localities install curbs is that they help with drainage after wet weather. But I don’t think we need to debate the merits of installing curbs here; we can all agree that they exist. For all the focus on curbed sidewalks in dictionaries, equating a pedestrian lane with a sidewalk would be a particular choice on OSM’s part. This choice comes with tradeoffs, but as long as the tradeoffs are acknowledged, we can move on to how to address those tradeoffs.

One of the reasons cycleway=lane on the roadway could not be sidepath=lane on the roadway is that the lane could well run somewhere down the middle of the roadway. It’s very common for a bike lane to be flanked by the through lanes on one side and a turn lane or parking lane on the other side. One hopes we don’t ever discover a pedestrian lane with other lanes on either side, but there have already been close calls. The “side” in “sidewalk” normally means left or right, not inside.

The Forum software reminds me again, that this is solved. I do not think so:

I dearly would like to ask @SelfishSeahorse to just take out all the sidewalk references from the proposal and restart the vote for pedestrian_lane. But I fear, reading the opinions voiced here, that the endeavour will fail. E.g. I added the foot:left|right suggestions by @drolbr to the wiki, it got corrected, without presenting evidence, purely by theory.

PS: Kerbs for the blind are not a barrier, they are a valuable means of way-finding, especially, where the building side of the “Gehsteig” (our name for sidewalk) is clogged with bicycles. Pushing that down to an attribute of an attribute shows bad manners.

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Yes, “barrier” is a curious overstatement for a curb of typical height – except for wheelchair users. Regardless, it is a physical separation. For a solid line of thermoplastic paint to serve as a physical separation, the road crew would need to layer it on real thick. A physical separation can be slight; it can even be permeable. But there is a clear difference in degree between carving a curb cut and leaving a gap in a painted line.

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I just mapped a pedestrian lane, I had to split a highway, my bad. In all the construction manuals I am aware of, separation by merely a kerb does not make the footway a separate entity (We’d call this “Gehweg” instead of “Gehsteig”.) But this is openstreetmap after all, and we should be able to come up with our own definitions.

PS: I will not though undo my change to the wiki, so as to not mention sidewalk lanes, 1) redditists cannot be wrong, these pedestrian lanes are sidewalks. 2) Looks like most of people that tag such features also go this way - though might be able to change their mind, in case a “proper” way was documented and knowledge spread.

Yes, there is quite a big difference between perceived safety and actual safety. It does not however mean that one of them doesn’t matter (or even that it is less important!) For example, many mothers will highly prefer pushing their prams on a kerb-separated sidewalk instead of on the middle of unprotected residential road, as otherwise they’d constantly be subjected to high levels of fear/stress. Even if, statistically speaking, their newborn child is more likely to die or have serious health issues as a result of inhaling all that car exhaust, then to be actually hit by a car and killed/heavily wounded. But as you said, it is getting offtopic :smile_cat:

I would highly recommend that if anyone wishes to use summarized documented practices of mapping pedestrian lanes on the road as a base (for making new proposal, or reactivating old inactive one) to open a new Discourse topic and link it here, instead of adding to this already too huge topic - if they would like to see any chance of it having a success.

One would do it by starting a reply here normally, and then pressing at that “hooked right arrow” at the top left of edit window and choosing Reply as linked topic.

It would be nice if (next time) you’d mention the wiki editor too (either here or on talk page) @Hungerburg , so they could improve it and/or explain if unclear. I’ve guessed it relates to me and went to have a look purely by chance. Anyway, I’ve tried to document lane and designated variants, and added a short comment why foot*=yes variant is inadequate (as it could mean things quite different than designated pedestrian lane). Let me know how it looks now, @Hungerburg and @drolbr.

It would also help if you used Discourse quoting functionality. Just select the text you’re replying to and select Quote. Otherwise, Discourse discussions become very hard (not to say impossible) to follow, especially in such gargantuan threads like this one. In other words, it looks like I’d probably agree with you here, if I had any idea about what you are talking about (i.e. context that you’re replying to) :smiley_cat: .

Sorry in case I might have upset you. Discourse eats quotes, when the reply immediately is below the quote and it also does not show, that the post is a reply.

On the rewording wiki for the umpteenth contender for mapping pedestrian lanes - as foot:left|right, I saw no use in mentioning your name. Actually, I walked the extra mile and learned from overpass queries and loading entities into the editor with background aerial, that the proposed alternative is used in a wholly different way by the mapping community - I did not bother to inform you - maybe I should have done so, because this alternative seems inexistent in data, so might better get dropped from the comparison?

Hmm? So, Discourse will eat the quote above this line? I have not noticed that before. Let’s see if the quote remains. I know only discourse complains if you try to quote whole article (instead of just part of it relevant for your reply). And no worries, I was not upset, just wanted to give a helpful hint so we all can use the Discourse better :+1:

I would guess at least foot:left=lane tagging would clearly designate pedestrian lane on the road? It does not make much sense otherwise. Did your research show otherwise? But I agree that foot:*=yes would be full of false positives (so I documented in wiki to avoid using that). Maybe @drolbr can chime in with their experience, since (if I understand correctly) they have been using such foot:left=* tagging?

I don’t think there’s any need for a revert. The mention of sidewalk lanes now links to a section that goes into such detail about tagging possibilities, for the benefit of this discussion, that anyone attempting to map a pedestrian lane for the first time will probably reconsider. :grimacing: Meanwhile, the table of examples remains as a discussion piece, and a different table aims to help mappers “comparison shop” between tag and way representations of sidewalks, but neither provides any direct guidance. So at this point, the page is as unassailable as it is unfinished. One hopes that eventually we’ll be able to write a more coherent, actionable piece of documentation based on consensus, even if that consensus varies by region.

From my point of view, it should be mentioned that by the numbers all the listed approaches have very low usage. There are about a million sidewalk=both and together 700k sidewalk=left|right, and almost all of them on highway=residential|unclassified|tertiary|secondary.

At least here in my region, over 10% of them record streets where the sidewalk is only separated by paint. So even if we assume an order of magnitude less for the entire world, we should expect that there are 20’000 to 200’000 ways out there where a paint separated pedestrian way has been mapped as sidewalk=both|left|right. In comparison to far less than 1000 for any of the presented mapping approaches.

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If only we had an unambiguous tag to filter on for a more precise number. :grinning:

I cannot help with that, the table is not my work, I just put kerbs first. Maybe it helps, to see it as a guide, when to add footway=sidewalk to a footway?

Just out of curiositiy, for whom does that make a difference, if this tag is there, or not? It got invented, to settle a conflict between mappers, not to help consumers, as far as I understand the history. I even considered footway=lane as just the same, before you said, you’d prefer it as an attribute to other highway types than footway :wink:

If you’re asking why footway=sidewalk exists, it was definitely for a real-world need, not just to settle a dispute. For example, Mapbox wanted style designers to be able to declutter the map by deemphasizing sidewalks that are conceptually part of the road right-of-way; this also would allow the style to emphasize footpaths that stand alone. Valhalla similarly wanted applications to be able to prefer roadways over the sidewalks that run parallel to them, without avoiding footpaths through parks and such. Micromobility profiles (scooters etc.) often set this option.

I can’t speak to the histories of the various attempts to coin a new tag for pedestrian lanes. All I know is that I encountered my first pedestrian lanes unaware that they’re widespread elsewhere. Sometimes, even a pro-sidewalk-way mapper like myself needs to tag the roadway because of the physical separation rule. footway:*=lane seemed logical by analogy with cycleway:*=lane. :man_shrugging: