Key:street:name
 street:name
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| Description |
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The name of the street that a sidewalk or sidepath follows. 
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| Group: placement |
| Used on these elements |
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| Requires |
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| Useful combination |
Status: in use
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| Tools for this tag |
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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.
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 April 2025, few mainstream routers perform map matching automatically when calculating a pedestrian route, and it is expected that there will always be edge cases requiring the street name to be annotated manually.
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=*. 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=*.
In some rare cases, the sidewalk has a name in its own right, such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This name goes on the sidewalk's name=*.
Alternatives
This proposal would establish is_sidepath=* to affirm that the sidewalk or sidepath follows a street. Based on this proposal, some mappers have tagged is_sidepath:of:name=*. This key is much more common than street:name=* as of April 2025, but some mappers find it unwieldy or contrary to usual key naming practices. [1]
Proposal:Relation:street, Proposal:Street, and Proposal:Collected Ways would all group the elements that form or relate to the street, including any sidewalk ways. Proposal:Sidepath tagging scheme would use tags on ways to make the related street more discoverable, without referring to it by name.
For lack of a community consensus on the correct key to use, the OpenSidewalks team has recommended putting the street name in description=*. [2]
Software support
As of April 2025, cycle.travel is the only router that is known to make direct use of this key. [3] For this reason, some mappers have advocated for using name=* instead, identical to the tagging scheme for named sidewalks. [4]
