Is substance=gas_topology here a typo/autocomplete error?

way/1117703091

As you added sidewalk=yes to the parent roadand removed the information about a shared cycle route on the sidewalk you deleted, I fear your understanding may need a little refreshment from the wiki.

Separate sidewalks are mapped in a lot of places on OSM. The one you deleted had been there since 2014. People generally add them because they're useful for pedestrian an cycle routing. Knowing on which side of the road these features are is useful, as is the detailed information about accessibility like tactile paving and lowered kerbs.

You may think they map the mapping look messy. I would remind you that you should not map for the renderer. Deleting a feature which exists in order to "improve" the appearance of a particular map rendering is vandalism and likely to be escalated to DWG if it is repeated.

Of course I wouldn't add separate sidewalks to every street, I add the appropriate sidewalk=* tags to the parent street if mapping separate sidewalks is inappropriate. If you take a look at the streets around the roundabout, you will see that most of the available ways of tagging sidewalks have been added. On a lot of residential streets, which generally don't have crossings, they're effectively useless decoration, often added as a result of ill-advised projects using a tasking manager.

A shared pedestrian and cycle track on the sidewalk of a main road is commonly mapped as a separate way and the only justification to delete it is that it does not exist.

It does seem very odd that a mapper who spends so much time correctly adding access tags to non-public highways should be so ready to break cycle routing.

Really? What is sidewalk=yes supposed to mean? Don't break pedestrian and cycle routing just because you don't understand it, or you think the dotted red lines make the map rendering look untidy. It;s vandalism.

Also, I notice that you did not take the trouble to add tags to the parent highway to preserve the information you deleted. Adding undocumented nonsense like sidewalk=yes in a later changeset suggests that you don't know what you're doing.

Reverted, obviously.

Mapping separate cycleways and pavements is allowed and documented in OSM. Please don't delete other people's mapping just because you don't see the point.

Please revert your edit.

Thanks - I didn't realise I'd left that stub connected.

No problem. Where cycling is allowed, just adding bicycle=yes can be enough (or permissive, if that's the value already present for foot). You could also add segregated=no where it's a shared path.

If there's a circular blue sign explicitly permitting cycling, you could change it to highway=cycleway and add segregated=yes/no and foot=yes (this isn't strictly necessary, but someone will eventually add it anyway).

Please don't change highway=footway or highway=cycleway to footway=path. The default access assumptions for footway are unambiguous, those for path are not. Where ways were mapped as cycleways and had access tags (which you should not have removed), this would also break cycle routing.

Unfortunately, the names of some OSM tags are a little unhelpful and counter-intuitive, but for historical reasons we're stuck with them. If it looks like a path, it's probably highway=footway. What the law defines as a footway and everyone in the UK calls a pavement is usually tagged highway=footway + footway=sidewalk.

The mappers who added these features to the map almost certainly chose footpath for a reason.

In my opinion (and other will differ here), the only good use for highway=path is for desire-line paths also tagged with informal=yes, because no access values can safely be inferred in these cases.

I have reversed your changes because it is important that cycle routes are restored before the OSM daily extracts used by routing engines are produced.

Hi, thanks for updating this.

If a footway or road goes through a building, you can split the section where it intersects the building and tag it with tunnel=building_passage. You don't need layer=-1 here.

tunnel=building_passage

You have also tagged ways with foot=designated + bicycle=designated, which is unlikely to be the case. An access value of yes or designated implies a legal right to use a path, and designated is slightly stronger in the UK (used for public rights of way). In these cases the value is more likely to be destination (you can use it to get to the property), permissive (you can use it as a short-cut, but that permission could be withdrawn), or private (residents only, you could also add private=residents).

access=*#List_of_possible_values

Already mapped as way/204068874

I am aware that it's 3 years old, but spotted the detached sidewalk on Tudor Road while fixing a typo in a postcode raised by a QA tool.

a) I don't know of any routers which can plot routes which leap between adjacent highway ways, even if the parent highways were tagged with sidewalk:$side=separate. Hopefully routers will ignore the sidewalks, otherwise pedestrians are sent on very circuitous routes. If they don't work for routing and the parent highways don't have sidewalk tags, is this really anything more than tagging for the renderer.

b) No. Doing it properly, which includes noting the crossing type and accessibility features like lowered kerbs and tactile paving. That can't be done without either good street side imagery (not available off main roads here) or a site survey.

An example of what decorative sidewalks does for pedestrian routing is when you ask OSRM, Graphhopper, or Valhalla to take you from 63 Phillip Road to 11 Ilex Road. Without separate sidewalks, the route is a effectively a dot. With them as mapped, it's over half a kilometre.
osm.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm_foot&route=51.088666%2C1.148702%3B51.088431%2C1.148482#map=19/51.089020/1.147656

Rather than adding decorative sidewalks to residential streets without crossings, just surveying and adding sidewalk=* might be more useful.

The one on the South side of Tudor Road is at least harmless, since it is not connected to other highways. Others are actually detrimental to pedestrian routing, as crossings are not mapped.

I don't really see the benefit to pedestrian navigation in general and VI navigation in particular from adding decorative sidewalks to residential streets without crossings.

Most of what you and @alisonlung added for #waymap-project-SB on minor roads has been or soon will be extirpated. The sidewalks added on main roads are being re-mapped in a less negligent way, at considerable cost in the time and effort of volunteer mappers.

You appear to have tagged two section of the Longbridge Road/Fanshawe Avenue/Barking Northern Relief Road circular junction as foot=no in response to a StreetComplete task asking "Are pedestrians forbidden to walk on this road here?"

I have checked the available Bing Streetside and/or Mapillary imagery for evidence that there really is a (signed) pedestrian prohibition here. I cannot see any TSRGD diagram 625.1 "pedestrians prohibited" signs on the imagery, so do not believe that a prohibition exists and have therefore reverted your edit.

The wiki states that access tags reflect legal access. Subjective opinions about whether it would be pleasant, a good idea, safe, etc. for a particular transport mode are not relevant to legal access.
foot=*

As real pedestrian prohibitions on public roads other than those tagged as highway=motorway or motorroad=yes in the UK are quite rare and are always signed, this quest is probably better left disabled.

You appear to have tagged a section of the A406/A41 sliproad as foot=no in response to a StreetComplete task asking "Are pedestrians forbidden to walk on this road here?"

I have checked the available Mapillary imagery for evidence that there really is a (signed) pedestrian prohibition beyond the bus stop and the end of the pavement. I cannot see any TSRGD diagram 625.1 "pedestrians prohibited" signs on the imagery, so do not believe that a prohibition exists and have therefore reverted your edit.

The wiki states that access tags reflect legal access. Subjective opinions about whether it would be pleasant, a good idea, safe, etc. for a particular transport mode are not relevant to legal access.
foot=*

As real pedestrian prohibitions on public roads other than those tagged as highway=motorway or motorroad=yes in the UK are quite rare and are always signed, this quest is probably better left disabled.

You appear to have tagged several street section as foot=no in response to a StreetComplete task asking "Are pedestrians forbidden to walk on this road here?"

I have checked the available Bing Streetside and/or Mapillary imagery for evidence that there really is a (signed) pedestrian prohibition here. I cannot see any TSRGD diagram 625.1 "pedestrians prohibited" signs on the imagery, so do not believe that a prohibition exists and have therefore reverted your edit.

The wiki states that access tags reflect legal access. Subjective opinions about whether it would be pleasant, a good idea, safe, etc. for a particular transport mode are not relevant to legal access.
foot=*

As real pedestrian prohibitions on public roads other than those tagged as highway=motorway or motorroad=yes in the UK are quite rare and are always signed, this quest is probably better left disabled.

Please could you avoid copying tactile_paving=yes from the crossing node to the highway=footway + footway=crossing way?

From tactile_paving=*#Use_on_ways
"On a pedestrian crossing highway=crossing, when the tactile paving is used in a line all across the crossing. Do not use tactile_paving=* on the way when only the two spots where the footway ends are paved differently."

Where there is a short link between the sidewalk way and the crossing way and the tactile paving extends across the full width of the sidewalk, I have started adding it there.

See also https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2024-May/031331.html

I've seen and updated a few instances of this in Sussex. It might be worth a little edit to tourism=chalet, at least adding building=static_caravan to the "See Also" section.

Looking at that user's other edits, it's probably a DWG issue. I've flagged their account for vandalism.

How can you tell from aerial imagery that these are 36 storey apartment buildings, each containing only 6 flats?