Key:street:name
 street:name
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The name of the street that a sidewalk or sidepath follows or another street-related feature is located.  
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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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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 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.
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=*.
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
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. As of October 2025, this amounted to about half of the worldwide uses of this tag.[1]
Software support
As of April 2025, cycle.travel is the only router that is known to make direct use of this key. [2]
Examples
See also
References
- ↑ Taginfo for Berlin shows 8500 uses in combination with
amenity=*andparking=*in October 2025; worldwide uses is about 17000. - ↑ Announcement