I’m recommending them, but there’s tags like object:street to tag the street name the object is next or closest to. Although obviously adding the tag to a bunch of sidewalks would be less then ideal. But it is an option. I think there are a couple of similar tags to, but I can’t find them right now for some reason. They are out there though. Perhaps something like destination:street?
Generally those using wheelchairs or scooters need an angled kerb to move from the street to a raised sidewalk. Blind pedestrians are assisted by textured surfaces that indicate things like the sidewalk’s outside edge or other transitions such as street crossings. Using high contrast colored material to create the textured area would make them visible to those with low or otherwise impaired vision.
The wiki for footway=sidewalk has recently been updated to add the assertion that “The name=* tag should not represent the associated street’s name.”
Naming sidewalks may not be the most elegant solution, but while the proposal including is_sidepath:of:name=* is still at the RFC stage, what else is there to help routing software produce pedestrian directions which include street names?
I don’t have a view one way or the other** but I can see that you’re already talking to them about it, so hopefully some sort of discussion will come out of that.
Maybe they should reply here to put their point of view?
** except that the wiki can be prone to show only the view of the last person who edited it, rather than a consensus. Some wiki editors are great at avoiding this problem, some not.
1 Like
I have suggested that in my changeset comment.
1 Like
It is my understanding, that the whole reason why footway=sidewalk was created initially, was to signal renderers not to render the name=*-Tag, so one can name the sidewalk and get proper routing directions without clobbering the map.
3 Likes
That is exactly how I process it. It is very straightforward. It looks like I also need to process “is_sidepath:of:name” there too now. That appears on a couple of random wiki pages such as here but it is not geographically widely used.
1 Like
It’s been discussed a little for osm-carto in Improve rendering of street names · Issue #497 · gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto · GitHub
1 Like
The approved proposal said only that footway=sidewalk could be treated differently than a highway=footway without this tag. Some renderers have responded by suppressing the name label, deemphasizing the sidewalk’s color, or filtering out the sidewalk at lower zoom levels. Some routers and geocoders have also introduced heuristics around this tag.
As far as I can tell, the practice of naming the sidewalk after the associated street was first documented in 2015. However, several years earlier, there was an edit war in German over similarly naming sidepaths for cyclists and an associated talk list thread expanding that discussion to include sidewalks.
2 Likes