Tagging kerbs on crossings

General talk Tagging general discussion
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(related topic: Improving the Wiki documentation of barrier=kerb and kerb=* - #28 by westnordost )

  • 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

But which tag could be used? To summarize the current state:

StreetComplete asks for intersections between footways and road-ways if there is a crossing. It’s a reasonable assumption that there might be a pedestrian crossing and not just pure coincidence that footways branch off from the road on both sides at exactly the same node.

If there is a crossing, the app adds highway=crossing.

If there is no crossing,

  • it cannot add crossing=no because crossing=no should only be used if crossing the road here is either not possible or not legal. (This has been documented as such since 2008)

  • It cannot add highway=crossing + crossing=unmarked because a (vocal) part of the community understands that this tag should only be used on crossings that are designated in one way or another as a crossing, at the very least through a lowered kerb

  • hence, the compromise has been to add kerb=raised in such case (without barrier=kerb). It was the result of a long discussion in the old German forum.

Going forward, it could tag something else in the future. I see two options so far:

  1. Reconsider using highway=crossing + crossing=unmarked in such a case. Reasons that speak for this:

    1. Even if a crossing is completely unmarked and not designated in any way, when a footway crosses the road at this point, it is pretty much an informal crossing, like in this example here. Hence, for (router) applications that evaluate crossings, they might want to treat it the same as an unmarked crossing anyway

    2. In (some) areas where sidewalks are mapped separately even in residential areas, it has become common practice to add a highway=crossing + crossing=unmarked at basically every street corner, even if there is nothing in terms of designation or marking as a crossing, i.e. even sometimes no lowered kerb

    3. The iD editor still (AFAIK) suggests to add a highway=crossing to every intersection of a driveway with a separately mapped sidewalk. Subsequently, this crossing is tagged with crossing=unmarked. According to those voices from the (old) German forum, this is also not correct. But this feature exists for so long already, it has become somewhat of a de-facto mapping

  2. Use a different tag that does not conflict with iD editor preset suggestion rules. I think somewhere kerb:both=raised was proposed. What speaks for this is that it does not stir any disagreement in what does and what doesn’t count as a highway=crossing + (crossing=unmarked)

Edit: I currently tend towards option 2 though, or alternatively change nothing, as I understand that the suggestion has been removed from iD?

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