Barbed Wire over path

Hello,

I recently met a few paths that were blocked by a barbed wire fence. How do I map this best? Until now I drew a way over with a node sharing the crossing path and tagged the way as fence with fence_type=barbed_wire. The problem is: With what should I tag the shared node best so that navigation understands that this way is blocked? The barrier=fence tag is not supposed to be used with a node. Use general barrier=yes instead? Any better ideas?

Thanks

Barrier on nodes should probably be more about access control. One could argue that if the barbed wire fence is a permanent barrier that isn’t traversable creating a noexit situation on both ends of the way. At that point you wouldn’t view it as a continuous way that needs routing anyhow.

Depends though, I have only had cases until now that also included a different access after the fence (access=no mainly). I would think that barbed wire fence indicates some sort of private/closed area off area, no?

Not sure if I completely understand the noexit situation you mentioned, but my point is indeed to avoid the navigation to route through this way. Question is just, how to do that. :slight_smile:

Apart from that you’re right, in one case it was probably a private property. In the other case though, they just put a short piece of barbed wire fence over the way, probably to indicate that people shouldn’t take this way (and you couldn’t go around it). The rest was public ground and the path continued after the fence and ended in another public path.

Barriers on nodes are extremely common on footpaths in the UK (200k+: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/barrier?filter=nodes#values)).

If the path is one which one has a legal right of access then the simplest thing is to add barrier=yes or barrier=barbed_wire. Additionally things like hazard=* could be deployed. It is very common for legal rights of way to be obstructed by barbed wire I the UK.

Is a tag on the shared node really needed in this case? Shouldn’t a shared node between a way with barrier=whatever and a way with highway=whatever be enough to make routers understand that the highway is blocked? Tagging both the shared node and the fence way seems double… (There is no shortage of barrier=fence nodes in Sweden either, but the ones I checked were all “lone” nodes, without a corresponding way representing the fence.)

Hi Nildea,
Could it has been a temporarely situation ?
If I read the message you have come across a barbed wire barrier, it could have been used ro guide the cattle out of one field into another one or in the right direction.
Since youre allowed to walk and even camp within some limits I doubt the barrier as permanent.

No. For a range of reasons: it imposes quite a considerable overhead in terms of parsing the OSM XML for routing purposes; it requires that mappers map the fence/wall etc which might not be visible on aerial imagery; paths & fences/walls may have been mapped at different times with different levels of detail and therefore one cannot be sure that there isn’t a gap. It is not uncommon for paths which have stiles, gates etc in the UK not to be mapped to that degree of detail, but they are perfectly valid paths even if they apparently cross walls/hedges/fences on OSM.

I am not saying that you have to map the fence as a separate way; I am saying that if you map the fence as a separate way, there should be no need to tag the shared node with barrier=XXX.

That is not the point that was made. The way leads through the fence. It seems that the default value for the shared node is barrier=no.