Key:street:name

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street:name
Description
The name of the street that a sidewalk or sidepath follows or another street-related feature is located. Show/edit corresponding data item.
Group: placement
Used on these elements
may be used on nodesmay be used on waysmay be used on areas (and multipolygon relations)may be used on relations
Requires
Useful combination
Status: in usePage for proposal

By definition, a sidewalk or sidepath follows a street or road. This key is one of several competing methods for indicating the street's name when the sidewalk or sidepath is mapped as a separate way due to physical separation. Besides sidewalks, this tagging is also used on other street-related features to indicate which street they belong to. This includes, in particular, separately mapped street parking areas.

Rationale

Normally, routers include the name=* of each way along the route in guidance instructions. Pedestrians are normally instructed to "follow such-and-such street" when the route actually traverses one of the street's sidewalks. When sidewalks and sidepaths are mapped as separate, nameless ways, pedestrian routers are unable to access these names directly. Map matching has been proposed as an approach to recover this information. However, as of January 2026, few mainstream routers perform map matching automatically when calculating a pedestrian route. (CoMaps/Organic Maps performs reverse geocoding, with less accurate results. [1]) Regardless, it is expected that there will always be edge cases requiring the street name to be annotated manually.

For other road-related features, this tagging can help with analyses, for example, for parking areas, to make more reliable statements about the parking capacity of a road with reduced geometric processing effort and safe allocation even in edge cases.

How to map

First, map the street as a highway, indicating its name in name=*. Then map the sidewalk or sidepath as a parallel way, tagging it as highway=footway footway=sidewalk or highway=cycleway cycleway=sidepath, respectively. Finally, set this way's street:name=* to the same value as the street's name=*. The same procedure can be followed for other features (such as amenity=parking + parking=street_side + street:name=*).

In a multilingual region, you may also be expected to set multiple names in different languages, such as street:name:en=* or street:name:zh=*.

The highway=footway footway=sidewalk or highway=cycleway cycleway=sidepath may also have a name=* tag, for the name of the sidepath or sidewalk itself. In some regions, this is often the case when a sidepath is part of a longer cycle path that departs from the street. In some rare cases, a sidewalk may also be named, such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Alternatives

See Key:footway#Association with the street for other methods that have also been used to map street name on a sidewalk way.

History

This key was first used in 2018, though some of the early uses should have been addr:street=* instead. From 2020 to 2024, this key saw some regional usage but remained largely unknown.

In 2025, street:name=* was used extensively in an organized editing project for street parking in Berlin. street:name=* overtook is_sidepath:of:name=* in February 2026. [2]

Statistics

As of January 2026, there were 34,301 ways tagged street:name=*: [3]

  • 15,798 (46%) were highway=* lines totaling 1,794 kilometres (1,115 mi)
  • 18,331 (54%) were amenity=parking areas totaling 1.2 square kilometres (0.46 sq mi)

These ways were last modified by 482 distinct users. Of them, 21 users modified 100 or more ways and seven users modified 1,000 or more ways. [4]

Major concentrations of street:name=* are in London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Santa Catarina (Brazil), and several major cities across the United States. [5][6]

Software support

As of January 2026, cycle.travel and OSRM expose the value of this key in guidance instructions as a fallback for name=*. [7][8]

GraphHopper only recognizes is_sidepath:of:name=*, not street:name=*. [9]

Examples

See also

References