On Tue, 5 May 2020 at 11:54, Adam Snape <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd consider this particular proposed use of highway=no to mean "there is a > public highway here but there's no visible path on the ground" to be a > somewhat country-specific and counter-intuitive tagging practice. It's > certainly being suggested here as a solution to a country-specific issue > regarding the mapping of England and Wales' rights of way network.
That's not precisely how I've been using highway=no or would advocate others to use it. I would only use highway=no in the case where there is a legal right of way that either is not or cannot be used on the ground. The "is not" might be a case where there is a regularly ploughed or cropped field and the cross-field path is never reinstated, so everyone always walks around the edge of the field instead. (Though if the cross-field line is usually passable, I'd possibly still use highway=path there.) The "cannot" might be a case where there's an impassible ditch or a house blocking the legal line (where higwhay=path would certainly not be appropriate). I'd be quite happy adding a highway=footway to e.g. a cross-field path even if there's no physical sign of it on the ground, as long as I'm confident it will be walked by users of the public footpath. In terms of how highway=no should be interpreted by data users, I would say highway=no means no more and no less than "there is not a (physical) highway here". I think the tagging is needed on objects (e.g. ways with designation=public_footpath) where you'd normally expect to find a highway=* tag, in order to distinguish this case from the case where it hasn't been established whether or what type of highway is present. (Some people will add rights of way lines to the map, and omit the highway tag until they've done a ground survey to determine what is there on the ground.) The main point I think, is that if you've tagged the definitive line of a Right of Way, and there's no suitable highway=* type for it, it's good to add highway=no, to confirm that's the case. This distinguishes that case from the case where the correct highway=* type still needs to be determined and added. Robert. -- Robert Whittaker -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
