>Having some time on my hands at the moment, I'm trying to get my head round some of the inconsistencies/duplications/gaps in the usage of the >highway key. Having looked at the recent widescale adoption of "highway=path" in Germany it is clearly fulfilling a need. I'm coming to the view that >this is a need that we (England and Wales) didn't know existed, because we're used to red dotted lines for country footpaths, and have fallen into >using the same tag for rural and urban footpaths, even though they are generally physically quite different. We've therefore lost some of the physical >information you get on OS maps, where old hands know to prefer footpaths that follow tracks etc.
This relates to my plans for Freemap/OpenFootMap, which specifically targets walkers. My current rendering plans are to render two layers: firstly a lower layer representing physical surface, which would be a dashed black line with small dashes for highway=footway,bridleway,cycleway or path, and large dashes for highway=track. (highway=path is probably more correct for paths in my view, but less used in practice, so my Mapnik rules will treat footway, bridleway, cycleway and path equivalently). Overlaid on this would be a separate, transparent layer, for the actual rights, as opposed to the physical surface, which would use the designation tag to determine what actual legal right of way it is, and display public footpaths, bridleways and byways in different colours. I also plan to use designation=permissive_footpath (a footpath with known or implied permissive rights) in addition to the legal rights of way, in order to show known permissive paths. Finally this top layer would include a colour code for tracks known to be private (access=private), probably red. Rights of way not physically evident on the ground could miss out the highway tag altogether, and just have designation=whatever. This way we get the physical condition shown on OS maps, but also much better indication of where you can actually go than the OS maps, which typically do not distinguish between permissive and private tracks, a huge disadvantage for route planning. You'll see more of this in practice once I've done a load of designation=XXX tagging in my neck of the woods (at present only paths I've surveyed in the past 6 weeks or so have it) which should make it to next Wednesday's planet. Nick _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
