Tag roadways in San José with sidewalk=separate

[1ec5]

After #6 imported sidewalk ways throughout San José, some pedestrian routers began returning suboptimal routes because they assume a roadway is walkable unless otherwise specified, even if a sidewalk way runs parallel to it: openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema#454 (comment). Since sidewalks are now mapped comprehensively in the city, we should blanket the city’s roadways with sidewalk=separate, which is designed to disable this assumption.

If there’s no sidewalk running along the street, sidewalk=no would be appropriate, but it also seems to be common to tag sidewalk=separate in these cases, leaving it to a router to discover that there is no such separate sidewalk.

I don’t think this needs to go through all the formalities of the mechanical edit guidelines. This would be essentially the last required step of the already approved sidewalk import, and it would be concentrated in a specific city, albeit a vast city. Nevertheless, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of opportunities to communicate this edit with the local community.

[impiaaa]

Here is a MapRoulette challenge I created to review all roads in San José with sidewalk=yes, sidewalk=left, sidewalk=right, or sidewalk=both.