I’ve looked at the attributes/tags of the OSM highways but couldn’t find any information about my issue.
Is there a way to receive the information which roads (of the OSM highway key) are accessible by pedestrians? I know there is the “pedestrian” value, but I would like to find out ALL roads where pedestrians are allowed to walk (they can not only walk on pedestrian roads, sometimes also on secondardy roads, etc, wich are accessible for cars and for pedestrians both).
Is it possible to get this information using OSM data? Or is there a good workaround?
I believe this is country dependent, e.g. in the UK all roads other than motorways are assumed to have foot=xxxx where xxxx is the overall access for the road, unless there is a specific foot= setting.
You can’t, of course, assume that every non-default case has actually been mapped.
Just for my understanding: By default all roads except motorway/trunk, bridleway and cyeway should be available for pedestrians in Austria (my area of interest).
So I could download the whole highway key (overpass turbo: highway = ) and then delete all motorways/trunks, bridleways and cycleways. Then I have to delete the exceptions too, where access = “no”, “private”, “forestry”, “customers”, “agricultural”, “destination?” and where foot=“no”, “private” and “official?”. This should result in all highways available for pedestrians, correct? Or would you download the data differently with another query using overpass turbo? Would you download it with "highways=" or differently?
Duddelz, yes, you would probably be best off making a query which already excludes the roads you don’t need. Highway=* includes some strange stuff, for example highway=services, which indicates a rest area along a motorway.
For exploration purposes, you might be better of downloading a pbf extract (for example from geofabrik) and playing with that until you get to the query you like. Then ask at help.openstreetmap.org how to build the query itself
There are separate questions – whether it is “legal” to walk on a road, and whether it is “advisable” to do so.
If the rules of the country say it is legal to walk on any road other than motorways unless specifically prohibited, then that is part of the answer – though you should not presume that even where walking is prohibited, that prohibition will always be identified in the data.
But even where there is no prohibition, there are many roads where walking might not be safe or recommended.
For that, the most you can do is to evaluate the probability of a road being safe for walking – for example, if the road has sidewalks, or if it has been classified foot=yes, but that will leave many roads where safety for walking cannot be determined.
