Tagging kerbs on crossings

General talk Tagging general discussion
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Thanks, this is interesting. So iD complains when kerb= appears without barrier=kerb and Osmose complains when barrier=kerb appears on a road? This risks creating a lot of very slow edit wars between people who fix the tagging with Osmose and those who “fix” it with iD.

I would actually suggest that we mass remove barrier=kerb from all barrier=kerb kerb=raised nodes where the barrier=kerb was created_by iD after an earlier changeset created_by StreetComplete added kerb=raised. But as long as iD (and possibly other validators?) suggests that kerb=raised alone is a mistake in this situation, such a one-off re-tagging would just be slowly undone again, over time.

By the way, since I created this thread

  • I have updated the Wiki documentation for barrier=kerb and kerb= to better reflect current tagging practice
  • It has been pointed out that barrier=kerb kerb=lowered sometimes appears legitimately on roads in Germany. (This doesn’t block cars from using them but signals to drivers that they have to give way.)
  • It has been discussed on the German forum that OSRM won’t route cars over barrier=kerb except when either kerb=lowered or kerb=flush or highway=crossing is also present on the node

In short, the behaviour of StreetComplete + iD is slowly breaking car routing in some areas for routers (such as OSRM) that avoid barrier=kerb kerb=raised. By my estimate about 3,000 nodes worldwide are affected. I see three ways out of this dilemma

  1. StreetComplete could a different tag than kerb=raised to say that a potential crossing has been surveyed and the kerb is high - I have suggested this to @westnordost
  2. iD could stop adding barrier=kerb (see my iD bug report)
  3. Routers could ignore barrier=kerb altogether (as has been suggested in this OSRM bug report)

My preference would be for solution (2) but I don’t know how the iD programmers - presumably volunteers - prioritise bug reports. I invite everyone who agrees to “thumbs up” the Github issue, or, even better, to have a look at the code so we can create a pull request. I briefly tried this but I have no idea where to start. (I’m not even sure if the problem is in the iD code itself or in the iD tagging schema.)

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