Proposal talk:Crossing=priority

Please do not encourage the use of crossing=uncontrolled

A crossing proposal in the year 2020 should not support crossing=uncontrolled in my opinion. Rather, crossing=uncontrolled should be deprecated while we're at it. Fortunately, this value is increasingly being replaced by more distinctive terms, especially "unmarked" or "marked" – that should be reflected here in this proposal (see chronology and the chronolgy of other crossing tags). (The replacement of "zebra" itself is not something I can comment on just yet, but I could imagine it being a good idea if there are indeed different forms and legal situations about this kind of marking in the world – which is certainly the case). --Supaplex030 (talk) 20:30, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Okay. I don't have time to redo this proposal now, but maybe next week I can rename and expand this proposal to include crossing=marked and crossing=unmarked and possibly even depreciate crossing=uncontrolled. I'll only do this if other people agree with this (please discuss) and if I have time. --IpswichMapper (talk) 20:39, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Another option is to create a new proposal to replace crossing=uncontrolled with (crossing=marked/unmarked) --IpswichMapper (talk) 20:46, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

I support both crossing=priority and crossing=uncontrolled. I{tag|crossing|marked}} & crossing=unmarked isn't clear or informative enough. Not every priority crosswalk has the same marking, and not every marked crosswalk (not to mention there can be different road markings) is formally a priority crossing (this is not about whether pedestrians have priority in general). crossing=marked & crossing=unmarked should be used when it is unclear, can't be determined, or working with imagery only. ---- Kovposch (talk) 16:11, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

belisha beacons

What are your thoughts on the belisha_beacons=yes tag? Is it needed? Please discuss here. The reason it could be useful is if there are countries that have pedestrian priority crossings but not all of them have belisha_beacons. - IpswichMapper (talk) 20:43, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

You could use crossing:belisha_beacon=* (like crossing:island=* etc.) with values yes/no or better both/left/right, but I don't think it has to be part of the proposal. In my area we started to use crossing:kerb_extension=* and crossing:buffer_marking=* this year, see here (still under development and unfortunately only in German language at the moment). --Supaplex030 (talk) 20:57, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

They could use belisha_beacon=yes as a default value, with belisha_beacon=no used to specify the absence. road_marking=* and colour=* could also be useful. ---- Kovposch (talk) 16:14, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Comments on the situation in Italy

In principle a useful idea. In the jurisdictions I am familiar with, any marked pedestrian crossing gives priority to pedestrians over the traffic on the crossed road. Unmarked crossing (no vertical sign, no horizontal sign) means no priority.

And each country has developed their own tagging on how to to map them in OSM, and sometimes more than one.

This is the situation in Italy Any crossing tagged with “crossing=uncontrolled” or “crossing=marked” or “crossing_ref=zebra” do have priority of the road traffic. These are in total 91975 “crossing=unmarked” means no priority, of which there are 2691 Mapping of pedestrian crossings is far from complete, so we could add a fourth tagging variant for the some concept on crossings for the future, but I would exclude any changes to the past mapping.

Apart from that the priority rules are more complex than you may be aware of, when it comes to cyclists crossing as well, which is a common situation.

Specifically in Italy we do have a strange situation, that cannot be tackled with any tagging, unless you tag only the the signage, but not their meaning. On normal pedestrian crossings cyclists riding their bike have no priority, they need to dismount and push their bike, as pedestrians, to have the priority over the traffic on the crossed road. On explicitly marked bicycle-only crossings or bicycle-plus-foot crossings they have the priority over the traffic on the crossed road. So far so good If a pedestrian-only crossing is painted and signposted to connect two mixed foot-cycle-paths and/or cycle paths, cyclists have the priority even if the road signs do not show it (this is not defined in the highway code, but based on some legal cases and a letter of interpretation by the Ministry of Transport. The solution is to map what is on the ground, i.e. the signing, but leaving the interpretation of the signing to the road user.

In addition we have another area of uncertainty, i.e. the cases when footways meet cycleways. As far as I know there are simply no rules for that case.

And last, but not least, I would expect an additional confusion with this specific tag, as we have another type of “priority” related to foot-cycleways that don't have separate lanes for pedestrians and cyclists: on this type of ways the pedestrians do have the priority (“priorità”) over cyclists with the extreme case that cyclists have to dismount, if there are too many pedestrians on the same way.

Conclusion: adding priority=yes to the mix makes it only more confusing for mappers and data users

--voschix (talk) 15:29, 17 December 2020 (UTC)