Up until now, I have never seen a real life example of this. The only examples I have seen are artificial ones where the starting point is on one side of the street and the goal is directly opposite on the other side. In such a situation, you hardly need a router to cross the street, do you?

E.g. everytime when you start at one point of the street at a certain address (like a house or a shop) and need to cross the street before the next crossing, because you have to turn into another street (e.g. on T-formed junctions whithout marked crossings).

Maybe adding always two “footway=link” sections on both street sides everytime where streets or footways branch off could help.

Moreover: The tagged version still doesn’t indicate whether you can cross the street at a certain point. There are lots of places where crossing is almost impossible, for example because there is too much car traffic

That’s true of course, but in the end it’s the same like other risks which can not be mapped like to get stuck with a car in traffic or wait for a long time on your bicycle before entering a priority road.

or the sight is blocked. (In Germany, it’s even forbidden to cross at such places.)

In Austria it’s allowed afaik - only right next a traffic light it’s still forbidden here and barriers like chains must not be climed over. In the past it was also forbidden within 25 meters next to a zebra crossing, but this regulation was removed a few years ago, so it’s more legal and more common today than some years ago.

All in all I’m not against separate sidewalk mapping and dont’t have “the one and only alternative solution”, I just wanted to share some thoughts based on the use of footpath routers in recent years. :-)

Thanks for your thoughts! One unsolved problem with separate sidewalk mappings: In countries where it’s legal to cross a street anywhere, separate sidewalks create the impression that crossing the street is not allowed between crossings. Routers then create detours which are not necessary and make walking as sustainable transport mode less attractive. Of course there are groups of people like children on their way to school who prefer crossing on marked crossings, but there are other groups like people in a hurry or people with walking difficulties who prefer to cross between crossings.

I agree with Kevin Kofler: In countries where it’s legal to cross a street anywhere, separate sidewalks don’t make sense except if there is e.g. a fence or green space in between. I think what might improve the situation would be if renderings of map tiles could find a way to render unseparated mapped sidewalks automatically in some way so that map users could see if there’s a sidewalk (or not) without having to look in the map data tables

Ok, sounds good!

Great mapping idea, thanks! Is there a way to map a handle of a boot scraper, like here? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Door_scrapers_in_Austria#/media/File:Door_scraper,_Sechshauser_Stra%C3%9Fe_97,_Vienna.jpg