David Thanks for this - very helpful.
I take your point re highway=primary as analogy! I have seen cases where this has been accompanied by foot=yes, bicycle=yes, etc. but even I (;>) regard this as overkill! I also take fully on board your point about the huge amount of existing practice! Thanks also for your clarification re highway=pedestrian - all is now clear on this one! Is there no end to learning! One of my original intentions was to make sure that we recorded legal status where known (as this is a personal interest - to free up this information from OS licensing issues which have become the bane of my life). I have probably tended to overload the existing highway= tag in my attempts to do this and am tending nowadays to use the designation= tag for this sort of legal information (important for footpath maps - the next step - literally - after cycle maps?) Mike Harris -----Original Message----- From: David Earl [mailto:da...@frankieandshadow.com] Sent: 24 March 2009 09:24 To: Mike Harris; osm Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] highway=cycle&footway On 24/03/2009 09:05, Mike Harris wrote: > The problem - at least as I see it - is not so much with ways that > have blue cycle signs (round or rectangular) - these are, as you say, pretty clear. > There is more a problem with the quite widespread use of > highway=cycleway for a way which is also a footpath / bridleway / > vehicular road / farm track etc. - this seems to be happening quite > often where the way in question forms part of a SusTrans designated > cycle route (ncn or rcn). I still feel that these should be handled as > a relation of type=route so that the highway tag (which is likely to > differ widely along a ncn or rcn) can be used in its more standard and wider sense. I agree. If it is actually something else, highway=cycleway is inappropriate. But highway=primary doesn't exclude people on foot (except where explicity and rarely excluded) so nor should cycleway (by definition) as this covers nearly all cases in a simple way and it is how it has been done in practice in most places. In the UK, by default cycleway includes pedestrians and bridleway includes cycles and pedestrians. > We should aim to avoid selecting just one type of transport for the > highway= tag on a multiuser route to avoid any conflict between > different types of user/mapper. So should highway=primary also have to include separate tags for people on foot, on horse, on cycle? Please, let's keep it simple. And there is huge amount of current practice. The fairly recent (to me at > least) suggestion of the use of designation= tagging is helpful here - > although there are now, inevitably, a lot of ways with > highway=bridleway tags (by chance highway=footway does not present the > same problem as 'footway' is a different word from 'footpath' - > although the difference from highway=pedestrian is less clear - at least to me). highway=pedestrian was intended for a street which has been built for or converted to pedestrian use - for example, Burleigh Street in Cambridge. A footway generally wouldn't be wide enough to get a motor vehicle along and has a different character. Yes, there may be grey areas (a wide alleyway), but surely common sense comes into play at some point. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
