The thread I started had a pretty clear consensus against name, close to 75% by my casual estimates. So I did what one does when an idea you think is good loses a vote: got upset for a while, then accepted it, now I’m just here mocking the proponents of the idea I think is bad when they paint themselves into a rhetorical corner, and meanwhile working around the bad idea: tagging with the un-rejected is_sidepath:of:name tag and making tickets requesting data users use it.
In that case, I think the original poster is owed an apology for their innocent question getting blown out of proportion with misinformed overseas assumptions and schadenfreude. At least in your case we could chalk it up to the usual knee-jerk reaction against any mechanical edit in OSM.
Is it so hard to believe that different cultures have different conventions for what to name and how? Is it so hard to believe that the U.S. would be an outlier and a car-centric one at that? And now it’s a rhetorical corner only because those of us who live here are being asked to prove a negative legally.
That’s my fault. Using is_sidepath:of:name seemed like a good idea in addition to name on cycle tracks like that one along the A13. When someone later suggested street:name, that seemed a better choice as it also applied to sidewalks. I’ll clean up that and any others I’m responsible for soon.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen anything in this thread that makes me believe the discussion would have turned out differently in Norway, or that nationality is a dividing line in people’s opinions here.
As I said, if the argument is it’s a local community decision to make, I agree with that. Local democracy and all. Norway certainly has it’s fair share of community decisions on this regard. It’s everyone’s right to make the wrong decisions in life!
In Nederland, this discussion focuses on cycleways instead of sidewalks, but otherwise it’s the same issue. There is no consensus, mappers follow their own preference.
True, the opinions laid out here haven’t fallen neatly along national lines. But setting aside the well-intentioned opinions, we can answer the original question statistically: virtually no one in the U.S. community routinely copy-pastes street names onto sidewalks verbatim. Human factors and groundtruth suggest that this isn’t an arbitrary decision by the community.
That’s where we usually leave it whenever there are multiple tagging approaches, so hopefully that’s satisfying enough. I know some wanted a higher standard of proof, but something like a legal ruling wouldn’t exist because hardly anyone in the real world considers this to be a matter worth debating. Everywhere else, you all will just have to come up with your own answers about bicycle sidepaths.
