With many high-speed highways (such as Interstate Highways in the USA, Autobahn in Germany, etc.) you may have wide shoulders, but pedestrian use on the shoulders is inadvisable and/or illegal, because crossing to the other side means having to judge the speed of multiple lanes of traffic. All too often, people turn out not to be as good at that as they think they are. I live near a section of Interstate that has four lanes going one way, and five lanes going the other way. Just in the two miles closest to my house, I know of at least five people who have been run over, all fatally, while trying to cross the highway on foot.
-- John F. Eldredge -- j...@jfeldredge.com "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria -----Original Message----- From: John Smith <deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 11:38:31 To: Anthony<o...@inbox.org> Cc: <talk@openstreetmap.org> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Software goes on, brain goes off... On 2 June 2010 10:23, Anthony <o...@inbox.org> wrote: > You seem to have missed the rest of my post. I was arguing that a road with > no pavement but with a shoulder is *not* unsafe. OTOH, if the road has no > shoulder, and traffic traveling at 55 mph, and only 1 car a day, I'm not > walking down it. My mother often goes for walks on roads that have 3 or 4 times that amount of traffic at that speed, and she isn't the only one. It's perfectly safe to do so because there is room to get off the road and you can usually hear them coming, especially when it's a B-Double* instead of a car, I've never heard of any pedestrians being clipped or killed. The amount of traffic nor the speed they travel at nor type of traffic doesn't inherently make walking on a road unsafe. I have no idea of the legality of walking along roads outside towns, but hitchhikers do it often and I don't think they get arrested. However I think it would be a great idea to indicate the difference between legally disallowed and just not a good idea due to personal safety, I don't think re-using the foot tag is a good idea, because it might be legal, but not safe to do late at night because you'll get mugged etc etc etc. * http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:access:bdouble _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
