I’d like to suggest allowing named footways (highway=footway) to count toward CityStrides completion. The OSM Wiki for highway=pedestrian acknowledges its overlap with highway=footway, and the footway wiki supports adding names where appropriate.
Cities like Boston have officially named, signed pedestrian walkways and tiny streets that are legitimate parts of the urban street network. When editors change these from highway=pedestrian to highway=footway, they can disappear from CityStrides, potentially preventing users from achieving a true 100% completion despite having walked or run every street and named pedestrian route.
In addition to tiny streets that editors commonly categorize as highway=footway, here are two examples that seem to support the case for walking or running every street in a given city:
Both of the above are signed with official city street signs.
I understand your concern about sending runners into the woods, and I’m not proposing including highway=path``. Instead, could CityStrides include named highway=footway` ways while continuing to exclude ordinary trails and woodland paths? This would preserve that distinction while ensuring city completion reflects legitimate, named pedestrian routes, regardless of which overlapping OSM tag an editor uses.
(I also merged an old Support conversation on the topic into this thread, since it’s relevant here)
There’s a lot to review, to make this decision. You can click the top left Run button for each of these links to see the result:
This query shows all the footway records in Boston
I notice that highway=pedestrian is included in the CS import, but not highway=footway. Not sure if there is a resoning behind this? Is it intended or wrong?
i hope its intended. A pedestrian area is for instance walking area’s in city centres. sometimes delivery cars are permitted there. Imho, these should be included in CS since it’s a (limited) driveable road, mainly meant for pedestrians.
for instance here
Heideweg and Kampweg are paths/trails in a park. They are named but should not be part of CS (again, imho)
Koestraat lower on this map, is a valid runnable road. Its a field’road’ accessible by agricultural traffic and has a name.
Agreed. The trails may not be maintained well enough to run in some places so shouldn’t be included in CS count. ( still i like to run them if I can to color in the map )
OK, good points, but this time I’m not talking about Pedestrian area, it’s a street with the tag highway=pedestrian (or Feature Type Pedestrian Street). But maybe that doesn’t change your comment. Actually when I start thinking about it, some of the “foot paths” in my neighbourhood might be wrongly labelled. If it’s a paved road where motor vehicles are not allowed, maybe it should not be foot path at all, maybe they should be Pedestrian streets as well…
In my personal experience, foot paths that have a name are almost always maintained and runnable. If they are in such a poor state it might be more correct to tag them as ‘unmaintained track’. Especially in older cities in Europe, there is often a very narrow line between a pedestrian street or a foot path. In my personal opinion, it should be reconsidered to include the named foot paths.
And after all, aren’t they also usually the most pleasant places to run?
EDIT: I think the wikipedia definition of “street” (Street - Wikipedia) lends credit to my statement.
Lastly, I understand this is not an easy decision to make as it requires updating pretty much everything everywhere and will make many others sad for losing their 100% completion.
I’d like to heartily endorse this comment. If a foot path has a name why shouldn’t it be in CityStrides? Living streets get in and they’re often the same…pedestrian areas get in and they’re even less streets than foot paths are. If it’s runnable and it has a name it should be in CityStrides.
I would like to bump this. According to the OSM documentation for highway=footway: The elderly and small children and quite often also wheelchair users can use them with ease. They tend to be in urban settings, but not always. So these should be perfectly runnable.
It also mentions that highway=path should be used for uneven surfaces, unmaintained paths or hiking paths. So I think that highway=footway should be included in CityStrides, and if this results in undesirable streets, those streets are mistagged in OSM.
This recently came up due to an editor (unrelated to CS) starting to change the many non-driveable roads in Boston from “pedestrian streets” to “footways”, due to their size/width. If the editor keeps going and/or other editors make similar changes in other cities, we may lose a lot of legit streets. That said, looking over your query examples James, making the change to include footways would add a ton of non-streets to the list of streets to be run, and betrays the “run every street” idea. It’s a solution that causes far more problems than it fixes. Perhaps instead OSM editors can be persuaded to change these streets in question to “living streets” which would count in CS. I’ve seen that designation used in other cities with pedestrian only streets. In any case, think adding footways is not a good idea. Thanks.
