Has anyone here argued for not tagging a zebra crossing as a “zebra crossing” somehow? I thought the point of contention was whether other secondary tags could be allowed or encouraged alongside crossing(_ref)=zebra despite some arguable redundancy.
The main similarity between the 2008 highway=path and crossing=* / crossing_ref=* proposals is that both proposals sought to consolidate the values of a primary key, relegating some finer distinctions to a secondary key. However, the highway=path proposal further assumed that, for example, a path is a “cycleway” if and only if it has bicycle=designated. In other words, a renderer should equate highway=path bicycle=designated with highway=cycleway, full stop. These days, with routing engines relying heavily on the same access keys, sometimes too much, that old assumption is difficult to reconcile with the widespread view that access tags correspond to legal restrictions, and who knows what access restrictions to infer. If the highway=path proposal had attempted to replace highway=cycleway with highway=path bicycle=yespath=cycleway, we might be in a different situation.
The tangent about carpark crossings earlier highlights another problem with the highway=path proposal. Sometimes a local authority might officially call a path a “shared use path”, carefully avoiding favoritism toward cyclists, but in practice, even the pedestrians and horseback riders customarily call it a cycleway or bike path, so naturally a novice mapper will reach for the Cycle Path preset. This is exceedingly common in some countries, to the point that some routers have decided to assume that all highway=cycleways are walkable unless otherwise noted.
Similarly, if a zebra-striped crossing in a UK carpark lacks the legal authority of a zebra crossing, but it walks and quacks like a zebra, some mappers may be inclined to classify it as a crossing(_ref)=zebra anyways. So when the main argument for preserving crossing=zebra rests on common sense, it’s worth reflecting on whether there’s really a common understanding. What is really the essence of a zebra crossing – the legal ramifications, or the physical appearance?
For what it’s worth, I think crossing_ref=* never took off in the U.S. mainly because people here generally don’t name crossing configurations as if they’re entrées on a menu. The one obvious value would be crossing_ref=hawk, because a HAWK crossing has many distinctive features, including a specialized vehicular signal accompanied by a wordy sign (necessary for educating even experienced motorists), which we couldn’t begin to describe with other tags. Other than that, the official distinction between crossing and crosswalk is already relatively obscure, let alone Utah’s zebra crosswalk. In defiance of national regulations, California uses crossing:markings:colour=yellow to warn of a nearby school and sometimes requires crossing:markings=lines for accessibility reasons, but a typical layperson wouldn’t know to tag crossing_ref=school, and crossing_ref=clarification_for_sight-impaired_pedestrians doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
designation=* is underappreciated in general. I’ve been considering that key for places too, since border_type=* seems to rankle some folks. For better or worse, there’s a lot of momentum and history behind crossing_ref=*, so I’m wary of introducing yet another standard when we haven’t even sunsetted crossing=zebra yet. But I appreciate that it communicates a degree of formality that we don’t get from either crossing=* or crossing_ref=*.
