Sidewalks and Crossings

[CattMapper]

Two separate questions, but both relating to pedestrian mapping:

1. I get warnings from different editors when a sidewalk way ends near a vehicle road way. Is it best practice to have the sidewalk connect to the road, even though in physical reality, the sidewalk does not actually go to the middle of the street? Here is a related thread that seems to address this. But much of the discussion is over my head. I added some sidewalks to a park the other day and couldn’t make up my mind if the sidewalk should connect to the surrounding roads or not. (Bing satellite maps is good for that section to see how everything works together). Another example of a way that I have worked on that is closed to vehicle traffic. Should it connect to the road instead of ending where the physical sidewalk is?

2. Crossings: From reading the wiki, it seems that 2 practices are acceptable: you map the road and the sidewalks as separate ways. Or you just map the street and indicate in the tags on the street way if there are sidewalks or not. For the rest of this question, I am only asking about the the latter case (sidewalks not mapped separately). How would you specify where an official crossing it? Do you just drop a node in the middle of the road way, and tag it as a crossing? Does the crossing itself get its own way? Because if you create a way for a crossing, then you will have basically a footway that doesn’t terminate at another way, which the editor warns you about (from question 1).

Thanks for any help in clearing up this confusion!

[Woazboat]

@CattMapper

1. Is it best practice to have the sidewalk connect to the road, even though in physical reality, the sidewalk does not actually go to the middle of the street?

It’s required, not just best practice. OSM paths and highways are an abstraction of physical reality and need to be topologically connected to be useful. In reality, streets are not a line with zero width either.
Unless you tell OSM (= data consumers) that there’s a usable connection between two ways, the assumption is that you cannot walk/drive between them.

You can tag the small section of the footway that’s actually physically on the road with footway=link.
(Crossing ways should be tagged with footway=crossing instead)

For micromapping bonus points, tag the point where the footway crosses the kerb/curb with barrier=kerb.

@CattMapper

2. For the rest of this question, I am only asking about the the latter case (sidewalks not mapped separately). How would you specify where an official crossing it? Do you just drop a node in the middle of the road way, and tag it as a crossing?

Yes, just create a highway=crossing node on the road way where the crossing is.

@CattMapper

2. Does the crossing itself get its own way? Because if you create a way for a crossing, then you will have basically a footway that doesn’t terminate at another way, which the editor warns you about (from question 1).

I’d only do that if you also (plan to) map the sidewalks separately. It’s not strictly wrong to just map the crossing ways on their own, just incomplete and pointless and mixing sidewalk mapping styles.
You can temporarily add fixme=continue to the end nodes of ways that should be continued/connected further, but where you for some reason cannot immediately do so yourself.

[Negreheb]

Basically everything what Woazboat said. Additionally, if you are keen on ending the footway where it ends in real life but still want to connect it to the road, you could use highway=footway with Tag:footway=link - OpenStreetMap Wiki

I personally would probably tag the sidewalks separately and this makes some of these decisions much easier in my opinion - other will probably disagree :)

[GuardedBear]

FYI, for your first example of footpaths going through a park, I wouldn’t tag them as ‘sidewalks’ since they’re not immediately next to/associated with a road…