Talk:Key:crossing:continuous
Intersections of sidewalks and driveways
There's no reason that intersections of sidewalks and driveways shouldn't be tagged; the fact that, as a pedestrian, one has to watch out for vehicles when crossing service roads, whether residential driveways or more active service roads near businesses, is worth representing. Some may not consider it worth their time to map these, and that's fine - but this article's tagging guidance section shouldn't include instructions that discourage the mapping of sidewalk-driveway intersections with this tag. --Lumikeiju (talk) 22:17, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
@Lumikeiju: iD used to steer mappers toward adding highway=crossing nodes indiscriminately, as you're suggesting. However, this was a subject of much derision. So far, as far as I know, there has been a consensus that these driveway–sidewalk intersections probably should not be tagged as crossings in general. [1][2][3]
As a practical matter, a router that warns about every residential driveway would probably numb them to alerts about more substantial crossings, undermining the safety feature. On the other hand, a router for vision-impaired pedestrians needs to treat any intersection node with a driveway as a potential hazard, so the highway=crossing tag adds no value. That said, sometimes the driveway–sidewalk intersection resembles a typical street crossing, warranting crossing tags as an exception. [4]
The guidance you're questioning was approved last year as a result of these discussions. If you think this issue should be revisited, I'd encourage you to raise your concerns on the forum, where more mappers can see it and offer their opinions. (Or if you have already, I apologize; please link it here for reference.)
– Minh Nguyễn 💬 23:46, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
- I would echo basically what they said. To give an example, in a busy city you might end up with 20 driveway-sidewalk crossings between every intersection with an "actual" crossing. From OSM perspective and subsequent routing, it just becomes noise calling these crossings unless we introduce some additional tagging to differentiate them. The shared nodes are already there. If the routing wants to warn the user about every place where a sidewalk connects to a non-sidewalk, it can already do that. But there's a good reason no router does this. HellMap (talk) 09:49, 24 July 2024 (UTC)