Understanding the wiki page on sidewalk

General talk
174

The proposal for separate sidewalk ways envisioned that renderers would depict sidewalks differently than other highway=footways, for example by hiding sidewalks until higher zoom levels where they wouldn’t add so much noise to the map. Although OSM Carto has yet to implement this heuristic, some third-party styles do noticeably deemphasize sidewalks relative to independent walkways.

For example, if you navigate to this park in geojson.io and switch between Mapbox’s Outdoors style and “OSM” (OSM Carto) using the control in the lower-left corner, you can see just how much visual noise this heuristic removes from the residential neighborhoods – something designers care a lot about – while retaining the park paths with the prominence they deserve.[1] OpenTrailStash implements a similar effect, making sidewalks blend in with the roads at a glance. OpenTrailMap intentionally highlights walkways other than sidewalks as walking destinations.

In OSM Carto, all walkways are depicted as red dotted lines, making residential streets themselves appear to be cased in dotted red lines.
In OSM Carto, all walkways are depicted as red dotted lines, making residential streets themselves appear to be cased in dotted red lines.2560×1850 1.11 MB

In Mapbox Outdoors, the paths through Emma Prusch Farm Park are depicted as gold lines with dark casing, discernible against the park’s bright green fill, while muted gray sidewalks blend in with the residential streets they follow. (© Mapbox, fair use for critical commentary.)
In Mapbox Outdoors, the paths through Emma Prusch Farm Park are depicted as gold lines with dark casing, discernible against the park’s bright green fill, while muted gray sidewalks blend in with the residential streets they follow. (© Mapbox, fair use for critical commentary.)2560×1850 1.18 MB

In OpenTrailStash, the paths through Emma Prusch Farm Park have gold casing, while thinner white sidewalks blend in with the residential streets they follow.
In OpenTrailStash, the paths through Emma Prusch Farm Park have gold casing, while thinner white sidewalks blend in with the residential streets they follow.3456×1934 1.87 MB

In OpenTrailMap, the paths through Emma Prusch Farm Park are depicted as thick black lines, while muted white sidewalks blend in with the residential streets they follow.
In OpenTrailMap, the paths through Emma Prusch Farm Park are depicted as thick black lines, while muted white sidewalks blend in with the residential streets they follow.3456×1934 1.15 MB

Beyond rendering, some routers tailor their behavior to sidewalks or the lack thereof. For example, Valhalla has a built-in costing option that allows the application to favor or avoid sidewalks. This is separate from the option for favoring or avoiding walkways in general. Ideally, Valhalla would also vary its pedestrian guidance instructions to refer to “the sidewalk” instead of “the walkway”, just as it instructs the user to use “the crosswalk” when it encounters highway=footway footway=crossing. Judging from this discussion, Valhalla’s German Standard German localization would need to exercise care around terms such as Gehsteig and Gehweg. (Currently, it translates “walkway” as Fußweg.) As mentioned earlier, a navigation system could also use this information to decide when to infer street names from nearby streets using map matching.

So, I guess I disagree with this conclusion. Granted, we could be documenting these use cases more thoughtfully so the tag doesn’t seem as arbitrary.

  1. Mapbox’s car-centric Standard style deemphasizes all pedestrian infrastructure. After all, by the time it debuted, Mapbox already came to think of itself as an automotive platform. ↩︎

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