On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 4:15 PM, David Paleino <da...@debian.org> wrote: > Hello everybody, > as promised, I came back with an "official" proposal. > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Sidewalk_as_separate_way
"In particular, for blind people, it's important to have precise information when walking: to understand on which side of the street they are, for example. This is not possible when just adding tags to the main way -- a separate way ought to be mapped." My general frustration with your RFC is that it reads more as a stance than a proposal. I think that this issue of the blind, for example, is a bit of a false dichotomy, because the issue of sidewalk direction is handled in both methods" One can take exactly the opposite stance, which is that in order to help the blind, we should make it as easy as possible to map things that they care about. Therefore a sidewalk=yes tag would be the fastest way to get the maximum data into the map. This is especially important when talking about rendering and routing, which I think are the main use cases of this tag. Your proposal only casually mentions relations, but they're extremely important without the main road data (see later in this mail where I go into detail about this). But even so, I don't really care what method is used, but I think the proposal should be more factual and less ideological, even (and including) removing emphasized words such as "However" and removing emoticons. > I tried to summarize what my ideas are, and why I don't believe that tagging > the main road is any good. > > To summarize here: to tag a sidewalk: > > * highway=footway > * footway=sidewalk Later in this thread, David, you asked for a clarification of the term "real world" by another mapper. Humor of that question not withstanding, I believe the other mapper was reacting to the fact that we already have a great deal of difficulty getting casual mappers to work with our system. We've mitigated some of these issues with helpers like preset menus. With sidewalks as a separate way, you are now stuck with two unoptimal situations: a) The sidewalks have no road-associated data The sidewalks not having street data is, IMHO, a significant problem. It means that while it might be possible to get highly accurate routing directions in the sense of "turn right in 30 meters", you will lack information such as "Walk up Main Street". This is bad for everyone. b) There is a relation Relations are a powerful tool, but they're hard to work with. They're hard for renderers to work with (say those who render), they're hard to make work correctly in the editors (say the editor authors) and they're hard to work with, and even harder to teach others how to use. I know, I've done it. In this specific instance, your proposal lacks a relation example, or even the recommended relation type that should be used. Looking at the relation page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation I don't see a relation that fits. Can you provide an example which answers these basic questions? Generally, I think this proposal seems to be more of a reaction. Personally, if people want to map sidewalks, I don't care about the method. This way may be more technically correct, but after having run mapping parties and taught mappers, I think we need to encourage simplicity. - Serge _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
