I’m really loving the recent changes in my area to include nested cities at suburb level. Where previously I was working on a city with 2262 streets, I now have many smaller areas which are much easier to complete.
However I have noticed a couple of “streets” in my incomplete list that shouldn’t be brought into CityStrides. My OSM skills are not good enough to make any changes this time, so I would appreciate some guidance.
Eg.
These are emergency stopping sand traps beside a no pedestrian access freeway. The freeway itself is not included as a street in CityStrides.
In OSM these are a Highway Feature with tags highway = escape. I can see where access tags can be added, but don’t know what tag should be used as pedestrian/foot doesn’t seem to be an option.
I am wondering if it would actually be better to include a new exclusion in the CityStrides street query for highway = escape to catch all such features?
In my opinion this is using the name field wrongly. Name should be empty, and Emergency Arrester Bed should be in Description. If name is empty it won’t be imported to CS
I agree with @hans1 that they probably shouldn’t have a name. Removing the name in OSM would remove them on the next CityStrides sync for your city. However their could be a local need to have them named so other mappers may just re-add it.
I also agree that the highway=escape should be removed from query that CityStride uses. This would likely be a better long term solution to problem anyway. OSM description of that tag can be found here.
I also think these shouldn’t be named. If I were doing this edit, I would probably remove the name but not persist if someone re-added it. I don’t have time for OSM edit wars.
I’ve added highway != escape to the query, so those types of ways won’t be imported in the future (and the existing ones will be removed). This won’t change anything until the next release, so keep an eye in #announcements for that.
Hans, Marty, James, thank you for your comments. I really appreciate your advice.
I did some more reading around the use of the name field in OSM & agree with you that it has been misused instead of the description field. It may be a local thing in Australia, but having the name allows it to clearly show up in consumer maps & I saw some discussion of potential future benefits for vehicular GPS devices. I therefore haven’t edited OSM for this yet as I wanted to look into it further first.
Thank you @JamesChevalier for the upcoming query edit as this will permanently fix the issue regardless of the name being included in OSM or not.
