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Connecting linear highway=footway with area:highway=footway containing it?

In my local area, there are a lot of sidewalks or pedestrian footways mapped as areas (area:highway=footway) that contain linear paths marked as highway=footway running along the centerline, as recommended on the wiki. The linear paths are not connected to the areas, and the iD editor displays validation issues due to that. Should they be connected, or is this a non-issue that should be reported to iD?

Here is such an example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=21/52.46101/16.90936 (sorry about the full link, I cannot find how to get permanent IDs of nodes from the iD editor)

connection footway highway area

asked 04 Oct '20, 16:49

pie3636
26●1●1●3
accept rate: 0%

One Answer:

I would place a shared node where the central ways intersect area:highway polygons.

However, I don't think iD actually has such validation rules in place for area area:highway=*. Instead, I suspect that the iD errors may be caused by a the fact that your area:highway=* areas are additionally tagged with highway=*, which is not really the intended usage of these tags. So iD will treat them like any other highway=*, and flag missing connections as a result.

answered 04 Oct '20, 19:04

Tordanik
12.0k●15●106●147
accept rate: 35%

I think your diagnosis is right, because the validation rule seems to be treating the area:highway=* as vehicular roads - the validation error is "Sidewalk crosses Road Area". Since removing all the highway=* tags seems like a bad idea (thousands of tags to change and possibly breaking local consensus, although I found nothing about this on the Polish wiki), I think I will go with the shared nodes.

(04 Oct '20, 21:10) pie3636