Should sidewalks and crossings be unnamed?

[ezekielf (Zeke Farwell)]

@Jarek

the value of the highway tag itself is also defined based on car-and-truck criteria

If you’d written “the value of many of the highway tags …”, I’d agree. Yes a lot of the highway tags are motor vehicle focused due to the motor vehicle focused world we live in. But not all. highway=living_street is for streets where pedestrians are the priority. highway=cycleway is used for bicycle only streets in some countries. bicycle_road=yes and cyclestreet=yes modify any^[1] highway=* way to mean a road where bicycles have priority. You say highway=pedestrian just means the absence of cars, but I don’t see it that way. I see them as streets entirely for pedestrians that it would be lovely to have more of .

@Jarek

So the value of the highway tag itself represents the motor vehicle carriageway moreso than “the whole street”.

It’s certainly a fair point on major motor vehicle thoroughfares. But universally across the whole set of highway=* values? I’m familiar with pedestrian streets where there really isn’t any part that one could call a carriageway, let alone a motor vehicle carriageway. The whole thing is just one big pedestrian area.

@Jarek

So that leaves only the name that refers to “the whole street”…

Note that I wrote “tags like …”. It wasn’t intended to be a full list. I mentioned more here:

@ezekielf

name would be the most common tag for sure. Others may apply to the whole named street could include:

• Secondary name tags (alt_name, official_name, old_name …)
• Localized name tags (name:es, name:de, name:zh …)
• name:etymology
• ref and its variants
• operator, ownership, and similar tags
• wikidata and its variants

Basically any tag about the identity of the street that would apply to the whole thing, not just part of it.

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1. Within reason. Obviously a highway=motorway + bicycle_road=yes makes no sense. ↩︎