[RFC] Feature Proposal - One-way for pedestrians

General talk Tagging general discussion
,
190

That wasn’t really my intention. We both know that a proposal can’t dictate to data consumers what they’re supposed to do. I know the proposal said

Anyone who wants to know if a way is one-way for pedestrians can ignore the oneway=* tag

But I wasn’t trying to dictate to data consumers how to interpret tags, I was just trying to explain how the proposed tagging scheme would make life easier for data consumers once it’s been adopted.

Most pedestrian routers are currently ignoring oneway on highway=footway, so the proposal would have essentially confirmed that in the eyes of us mappers they can continue to do so.

I wonder if you would have been less opposed to the proposal if I had written the following?

If the tagging scheme described in this proposal is fully adopted, then anyone who wants to know if a way is one-way for pedestrians will only need to look at the oneway:foot= tag. They could continue to ignore the oneway tag in pedestrian routing, and would no longer need to look at vehicle access tags to figure out if a way with oneway=yes is one-way for pedestrians.

The main practical effect that the proposal would have had (in my mind) is that it would have expressed community approval for the idea of adding oneway:foot= to lots of footways and paths that currently only have a oneway= tag, for added clarity. My proposal suggested nudging mappers to add oneway:foot to reduce ambiguity, by

  • changing the Wiki recommendations on how to tag
  • adding some validator warnings that warn mappers that in some cases oneway= is ambiguous and what the mapper is trying to say can be better expressed with oneway:foot=yes or oneway:bicycle=yes
  • changing footway presets (e.g. the one in iD) which currently offer the oneway key, to offering oneway:foot= and oneway:bicycle instead

Of course, if I was writing a router myself right now, then given the current tagging situation, if I wanted to get it right most of the time, I’d probably implement some logic that looks at vehicle access tags (if it’s bicycle=yes then it’s two-way for pedestrians) aka @drolbr’s rule, or at geographic location (if it’s in Germany then it’s two-way for pedestrians).