Tag:footway=sidewalk
+/- footway=sidewalk
mapping sidewalks as separate ways
Used combinations in
Approved |
Contents |
Description
footway=sidewalk can be used along with highway=footway to tag sidewalks (also known as pavement/footway in the UK) as distinct ways from the main road. This is a tagging approach which can be used to capture more detail relevant to pedestrians that that the alternative one where the highway itself is tagged with sidewalk=* using values of 'both/left/right or no' as appropriate.
Note that in many countries there is an assumption that roads are usable by pedestrians unless they are motorways or are tagged foot=no; this is however based to legal access for pedestrians rather than the existence or not of sidewalks. See the Sidewalk article for a wider discussion of the issues and approaches to mapping sidewalks and see access=* for a discussion about access issues.
Terminology: The North American English 'sidewalk' is used in this case because footway and pavement, the British English alternatives are open to confusion - Footway, the British legal term is already used within OSM for a general footpath, and pavement in the USA refers to the surface of a road rather than the pedestrian part of a road.
Usage
To start using this tag, map the sidewalk as a way alongside the main road, with the following tags:
You might use additional tags:
- incline=*
- kerb=*
- wheelchair=*
- smoothness=*
- surface=*
- tactile_paving=*
- width=* / est_width=*
Crossings
Please read the footway=crossing page to know how to properly map crossings when using this tagging scheme.
Examples
| Image | Discussion |
|---|---|
|
Ways marked with A are footway=sidewalks, while ways marked with B are footway=crossings. Nodes marked C are kerb=flush (or another similar tag).
In this example, if you use relations, you should create a relation with "1" as street, and the vertical sidewalks as members (role sidewalk). In this case, all the crossings of the intersection belong to both streets, so they should be added (still role sidewalk). The small curved portions between the two sidewalks belong to both streets, so they should be split, and added too. The same applies for road "2", where the main sidewalks are the horizontal ones. Caution: There may be an issue with this example. If instead of kerb=flush, the kerb is tagged with kerb=raised, this implies wheelchair=no, which means that a wheelchair routing engine would not be able to route a user along the sidewalk (e.g. from left to top, not crossing the road). Instead, the kerb=* node should be off the main sidewalk, such as by using a short way from the center of the sidewalk to the kerb. A new example will be provided at some point to reflect this. -- Joshdoe 13:24, 21 June 2011 (BST) |
Use of a relation (optional)
| type=street |
|---|
| type=associatedStreet |
To couple the sidewalk to its respective road, the ways can be added to a relation of type associatedStreet. The proposed type street is another commonly-used street aggregation relation. The following roles work in either.
(Traditionally, both relation types are used for a very different purpose - for linking houses to the street whose name is used in their address, rather than the street they are physically accessible from -, which accounts for most of the existing uses.)
| Element | Role | Recurrence? | Discussion |
|---|---|---|---|
|
street or blank | one or more | the multiple ways that form the main street |
|
|
sidewalk | one or more | the multiple ways that form the sidewalk and the crossings |
Using relations for this purpose is very much optional, and you may wish to omit this in order to keep your mapping simple.
See also
- Proposed features/Sidewalk as separate way - the proposal that introduced this tag
