This thread has delved quite far into discussing whether sidewalks/pavements are considered to have names in the real world. This is an interesting philosophical debate that depends on the person you ask and the area of the world in question. It is probably not resolvable. We really don’t have try to answer this question here though.
The questions that matter for OSM are:
- Should a way tagged
footway=sidewalkalso have a tag containing the name of the street? - If yes, should that tag be
name=*or an alternate name tag likestreet:name=*or something else.
We can look at how river names are tagged for some guidance here. We tag name=* on linear waterway=river ways because these ways are the simplest representation of the whole river than can be mapped. Rivers can optionally also have natural=water + water=river polygons covering the area of the river. We don’t add name=* tags to these polygons because we consider this river area to be an additional detail about the river, not the primary representation of the river. This is also just a pragmatic choice since there hasn’t been much demand for names on the river area polygons so far and name tags on the areas would make more work for renderers that don’t want to see duplicate names. If things change and there starts to be demand for names on river areas, I’d advocate for an alternate name tag (something like waterway:name=*) to avoid causing difficulty for the data consumers that are used to the river areas not having names, while also supporting the new use case.
I’d argue that the OSM street/road data model is quite similar to that of rivers when it comes to names. We have a linear centerline representing the whole street/road corridor and this is where the name=* tag goes. You can tell it represents the whole corridor/right-of-way because where sidewalks and cycleways are mapped as separate ways, we tag sidewalk=separate and cycleway=separate on the this central way to indicate “this is the situation with sidewalks and cycleways on this street corridor”. The separate sidewalk and cycleway ways are additional detail about their geometry, but not the primary representation of “this street does or does not have sidewalks and/or cycleways”.
I would say footway=sidewalk ways should not have the name of the street in the name tag for the same reason that water=river areas don’t. The name of the street is already in the name of the central street way which represents the whole corridor, including the sidewalk. That said, if certain data consumers would find it useful to have street names tagged on footway=sidewalk ways, then I’d fully support putting the street name in an alternate name tag. My preference would be street:name.
Here is an area where I’ve tagged the sidewalks and crossings with street:name as an example. It was a lot of work, and if data consumers can manage without this tagging I’d be perfectly happy to not do it. If it is useful, though, I’m sure we can develop tools to make it easier. Something like the colored buildings JOSM theme but for sidewalks would probably help a lot.