[Poll]: Interpreting oneway=yes

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@Hungerburg

So the proposal that would have turned the presence of oneway=yes on a footway a meaningless addition that pedestrian routers or other consumers should just ignore failed to reach the required three out of four.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of talk about oneway=yes being ambiguous. Something smells foul.

This discussion has a different scope and purpose than the proposal. The proposal called for us to tell data consumers to ignore oneway=yes on highway=footway, which is a different tag than highway=pedestrian. Relatively few highway=footways are areas; area:highway=footway is used instead.

This discussion is framed as a thought experiment around “What would a router do?”, which is the aspect that in my opinion undermined the proposal. A slightly ambiguous tag isn’t necessarily meaningless; it can still be a useful signal. In some other cases, a router will ignore or downplay a one-way tag – not because it’s ambiguous, but because it’s irrelevant according to the router.

@Hungerburg

On highway=pedestrian, it is different, there I observe Vienna Convention one-way signs, and these of course only apply to vehicles.

Yes, if the source of the oneway=yes tag is a sign, then the definition of the sign becomes relevant. And if it’s the standard one-way traffic sign, then in some jurisdictions, it would be limited to vehicles – but not because of the Vienna Convention:

@Minh_Nguyen

It might come as a surprise that there’s no global legal basis for treating a one-way restriction as half of a vehicular access restriction. The Vienna Convention is silent on the meaning of a one-way road or carriageway and doesn’t proscribe the use of these signs off of the road. The more global Geneva Convention sets one-ways aside as a domestic matter.

On the other hand, there are cases where the source of the oneway=yes tag is clearly not the standard sign, so the definition of that sign is irrelevant. And then there are some other cases where the source isn’t so clear. Imagine if we had a StreetComplete quest for adding source:oneway=*, like there is for distinguishing explicit and implicit speed limits via source:maxspeed=*. Then there wouldn’t be as much ambiguity, at least for the ways that use it.