area:highway=crossing and area:highway=bicycle_crossing is not standard tagging, or even widely known or documented

[Discostu36]

highway=footway, highway=cycleway and highway=path that are crossing an area:highway should be rendered on top of it instead of be hidden beneath.

[matkoniecz]

That is intentional but from looking at it that may be wrong/tricky.

I thought that one is supposed to use area:highway=crossing https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/area%3Ahighway=crossing for areas that are crossings (part of road used by pedestrians for crossing), but I see that it is used really, really rarely. And area:highway=bicycle_crossing https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/area%3Ahighway=bicycle_crossing is used on exactly one crossing that I mapped.

Is there an accepted standard for marking area of crossings? That is definitely an useful information and needed in some use cases.

[Discostu36]

There are mapping guidelines in the wiki. I don't know if they can be considered a standard. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/area_highway/mapping_guidelines

My example might not show a best practice for area:highway mapping, but I still think it might be good to show the ways in such a case. What was the reasoning behind not showing them?

[matkoniecz]

What was the reasoning behind not showing them?

I was sure that you are supposed to use area:highway=crossing for pedestrian crossing area over road. And forgot that area:highway=bicycle_crossing is definitely something that I personally invented and used on a single crossing.

With using them map renders like this:

(view from https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.05521/19.92771 )

and rendering lines over them would be very ugly

[matkoniecz]

OK, the problem is with area:highway=crossing and area:highway=bicycle_crossing. Thanks for spotting the issue, it is a very useful bug report!

I guess that I need to handle it somehow.

(1) documenting this tags (what if people hate them and consider as unacceptable? I think that it is not much worse than area:highway in general and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like exists). Maybe just make proposal without going though a vote? What about additional responsibility of doing this as part of microgrants (tagging proposal time and tag documentation would be considered as part of mapping that is not being paid for, but still it would be a bit tricky because tagging is needed specifically for this project) ?

(2) changing behavior of rendering such as this tags are not strictly required (maybe render paths/footways/cycleways over area:highway as requested but below areas indicating area of a crossing? )

(3) documenting tags used in map style would be a good idea in general

Main problem here is that I really need tagging allowing to record this info and at the same time I want to avoid forcing tagging scheme on everyone as part of a paid project. And I am unsure how to balance between this two.

(note: this tagging was used when tactile maps project was at beginning and I expected that I can complete it fully within 400 hours, before even considering getting some funding)

[Discostu36]

When you think about it, it makes sense that they are not a separate area. Bicycles and pedestrians are crossing the street area there, but that doesn't change it from being the street. When you have a driveway where cars are crossing the sidewalk, this would also not change it from being the sidewalk, it would still be area:highway=footway

[matkoniecz]

I am now thinking about mapping area:highway=crossing (or area:highway=pedestrian_crossing) within area:highway=secondary (or other highway value).

So there would be polygon representing pedestrian crossing within area representing carriageway.

Or special setting allowing to generate that from linear footway at runtime (what would break with any crossing that are unusually wide, unusually narrow or in any other way unusual and would require extra configuration from user).

[matkoniecz]

Example of actual use:

[matkoniecz]

Posted on tagging mailing list right now

[matkoniecz]

Next step would be to summarize crossing area discussion on tagging mailing list and decide what is the preferred tagging, and document it

[matkoniecz]

Either way there was no great interest or opposition, there is no established tagging, so lets keep using current one for now.

[matkoniecz]

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/area_highway/mapping_guidelines

has no explanation/idea how to map areas of pedestrian crossings, though has hint that it is fine for cycleway crossings

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2021-May/thread.html#61473 - I need to reread it

[matkoniecz]

I started drafting https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/pedestrian_crossing_as_an_area

[matkoniecz]

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/pedestrian_crossing_as_an_area is now in a RFC