The Trouble with Trunk Roads

itsafrogslife · December 9, 2020, 2:34pm

I was wondering why some of the main roads in Liverpool weren’t appearing in the list of completed or uncompleted streets. When I looked on OSM I saw they are all added as Trunk Roads and that the ‘Allowed Access’ field has ‘Foot’ = ‘Not Specified’ (by default?). I guess that’s because you can’t assume that a trunk road has a footpath.

What it means, however, is that I’m going to have to do a hell of a lot of editing to change the acccess to “Foot” = “Yes” for all those roads I know are most definitely runable using a path or pavement.

Has anyone else found the same?

ericjrw · December 9, 2020, 4:11pm

I wonder if OSM allows for scripted, i.e automated (perhaps via SQL) edits? Might be a question for the Slack group - osmus.slack.com

mcoleman38 · December 9, 2020, 7:30pm

Hi Graham, this entry About the Node, Street, and City Data has a section on streets and in there you’ll find a link to a description of the query that is used to determine what to include from the OSM data. Checking that out will tell you what it is about certain roads that is leading to them not being included.

8f7162110d9eeaf907ab · December 9, 2020, 9:08pm

Trunk roads are excluded via the query since in most countries these are “car only” type roads. The UK has all A roads mapped as highway = trunk (see here https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dtrunk), which includes roads that go pretty deep into cities like the one from your example. Unless the query is altered, changing the foot permissions won’t make a difference so not much point going down that route, unfortunately. The “good” news is that it’s not that many streets: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/111l

itsafrogslife · December 10, 2020, 5:19pm

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately in Liverpool the “good” news isn’t that good for me given that there are quite a few trunk roads, including those in the city centre on my screenshot and Queens Drive ring road which has housing along the majority of its length. I’m going to run them all anyway (why wouldn’t I?), it’s just a shame they’re not counted on CS.