On Tuesday 21 August 2012, Adam Hoyle wrote: > I agree - from the wiki > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dfootway a footway seems > unambiguously to be what americans call a sidewalk.
The way I see it, a sidewalk has to be on the "side" of something. The majority of footways mapped in urban areas are generally cut-throughs that create routes not available via the other roads. In fact, I'm one that advocates that "sidewalks" are the exact definition of what should _not_ be mapped using separate highway=footway ways as it causes all kinds of mess and routing brokenness. So part of me thinks it's a good thing to have a separate noun and concept for these. But then again, when designing schemes it's usually a helpful idea to re-use vocabulary in self-similar ways. And footway=left does _kind of_ mirror the way the highway=footway footway=blah works using the familiar foo=bar bar=baz pattern. Oh man this is why I don't join the tagging list. > It's totally confused me, so in the bit of UK countryside I edit I have added > tons of ways with highway=footway tags through woods, fields etc, when in > fact I am pretty sure they should really be highway=path tags. I realised > this a little while ago, so this thread is timely. > > Do please correct me if I'm still confused as I'm slowly going through the > process of re-tagging them from footway to path. Well, highway=path is supposed to be the more general form of highway=cycleway|footway|... and tends to crop up more in the countryside as paths don't tend to be so strictly differentiated. Anyway, agreed the bulk edit is dumb. robert. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
