How should a footway or path be tagged that is one-way for pedestrians? We recently had another long community forum discussion on the topic. The outcome of this discussion is that I propose the following approach:
Formalise the existing key oneway:foot=* (for ways )
This is meant as a compromise between mappers who argue that oneway= only ever applies to vehicles, and that therefore oneway= on a highway=footway or path only means vehicles (such as bicycles who may be allowed to use the path), and those who argue that oneway= on a highway=footway or path means pedestrians. The two interpretations directly contradict each other, and the mood in the forum discussion was that it’s time for the community to agree on a solution. This proposal is my attempt to solve this long-standing issue.
If you accept that oneway does not apply to pedestrians unless specifically oneway:foot is tagged, then there is no ambiguity w.r.t. oneway on highway=path and no need to deprecate that.
The numbers of usage show that it is not clear and the wiki was, as so often, contradictory, depending on which page you looked at. See discussion
However, there may other ways to solve the problem without deprecating oneway on footways.
We could just have the editors implement the warning when no vehicles are allowed on footpaths. QA tools could also check this.
That’s why I wanted to add that not only the editors but also the renderers should support oneway:foot and oneway:bicycle. (Of course we can’t force anyone to implement this, but we could at least make systematic feature requests.) It is also not certain whether the most important routing applications already support this.
Wikifiddling is a complete irrelevance until the problem data is fixed. Here, for example is a sample of nwr["oneway"="yes"]["highway"="footway"]["bicycle"]["bicycle"!="no"]["bicycle"!="dismount"]({{bbox}}) for the UK and IE. There are of course other tag combinations to consider too.
Each and every one of these would benefit from an in-person survey. I suspect that in some cases there may actually be distinct cycle and foot infrastructure that would benefit from being mapped that way. In other the oneway tag might be just wrong - perhaps part of the way is oneway and part not (that’s what I found when I looked at the examples near me).
If you are considering “voting” on this RFC and there are examples like that in your city please extract yourself from your chair and go out and survey them first.
Thanks, I changed two ways back to path which were wrongly changed to footway with iD.
I have trouble with Way: 37177674 | OpenStreetMap and Way: 859483937 | OpenStreetMap as these are footways but with “Fahrrad frei” (bicycle=yes) only from north to south.
This seems overly complex to me. If for some weird reason an actual footway is two way for pedestrians but one way for vehicles, use oneway:vehicle=yes.
This is standard tagging in Germany for footway with “bicycle free” in one direction. If the proposal has an result we have to change a lot of this. So at the moment it doesn’t matter if one tag oneway=yes or oneway:bicycle=yes in these cases. both variants are existing.
Numbers in Germany:
2698 x footway + bicycle=yes + oneway=yes
2954 x footway + bicycle=yes + oneway:bicycle=yes
and a unknown but I guess a very high number of missing oneway.
Well, that is along current tagging schema as oneway=* is only valid for vehicles.
I do not like the idea to tag oneway:*=* without oneway=yes.
Anyway, could someone please show me a public way which has oneway signs for pedestrians. I have only encountered one case in person but that was a hiking path and it was signed with signs saying “do not turn around” but no official signs. All other places were private like queues in an amusement park.
This was already discussed in the other thread. Typically you have no “oneway” sign. You may have a kind of “no entry” or “no pedestrians” from one side. There is no explicit turning ban.
The main use I have for one way pedestrian ways is in metro stations. Ticket gates enforce one way pedestrian traffic but because they are nodes, you can’t specify the direction on them. The only way to do this is by tagging the footpath through them as one way.
Other examples are airport security checks and border control points,
Orla Perć hiking trail was mentioned as one signed with “travel allowed only in one direction” but they were not using the same signs as on roads.
Oneway symbols are appearing on queues in an amusement parks, border crossings, airports, but they typically use symbol, not oneway road signs.
well, strictly speaking at least in Poland there is no 100% strict turning ban for cars either (applicable mostly in cases like getting back in case of blocked road on a minor oneway road).
and if someone found such case while surveying, where current tagging guidance makes impossible to tag it - it would be useful to give it as example in proposal!
I can remember several situations… entrance and exit ways in themepark attractions. Dedicated staircases for going up or down. Queueing detours infront of entrances or ticket offices. Moving walkways.
Of course, it’s usually not as enforced as it is for vehicles.
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