When to map a crossing?

Mapping the intersections of footway=sidewalks and highway=services is very important! Pedestrians, especially those with disabilities, need to know where cars are likely to intersect with their path of travel.

I think a good “rule of thumb” is to map these intersections as crossings (with highway=crossing tags on the node, and footway=crossing tags on the section of what would otherwise be footway=sidewalk ways) when the highway=service is an access road to a business or properties with 5+ residential units.

If I recall correctly, this is the metric by which the Seattle Department of Transportation determines what cycleway-service intersections qualify for painted markings, and similar rules are present elsewhere (though the exact number of residential units or how busy the business is will vary by jurisdiction).

I believe crossing:continuous=yes is a good tag for these, though there was some disagreement in this thread: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/rfc-feature-proposal-continuous-crossings/105478 (note, @Lumikeiju is me on my personal account)

We should probably also have a different tag for the really minor “crossings” of sidewalks over single-family residential properties.

I think this is something that the OSM US PWG should address! I will post a link to this thread in the OSM US Slack channel we use, and I’m restarting this discussion internally for OSW.