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Comment by apt-apt-apt-apt | Hacker News Reader

Aren't there many places where a highway with no sidewalk is the only walkable option? So if someone saw your not-walkable, they might think not walkable at all.

Seems like you guys had two different perspectives, both arguably right. Maybe it needs to be split into technically-walkable and comfortably-walkable layers.

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The trouble is you start getting into subjectivity. Some people are comfortable with vie ferrate, many are not. The only thing you can do is tag with objective features that can be verified on the ground, including physical features and legal restrictions that are indicated by signage.

Rather than compressing a judgment about reality into a single boolean, it seems more natural to break it down into smaller observations and evidence, then derive conclusions from them. Users wouldn't need to touch the ontology directly; they'd just answer small, concrete questions like "Is there a sidewalk here?"

FWIW this is exactly how it works on OSM, and probably why OP is complaining people were being pedantic by telling him he "shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking".

"Would an ordinary person want to walk here?" is pretty subjective. "Are people legally prohibited from walking here?" is pretty objective. Generally only the latter would be recorded in OSM.

Or add a "probability of injury or death" attribute for more granularity.

Walkability based on time of day?

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