Just out of curiosity I was looking at fords and I am seeing a lot of ways that are tagged with ford=yes that clearly are not. From motorways to secondary ways to tracks.
All of them seem to have been edited by iD. Was there a bug in iD that maybe set foot=yes to ford=yes or something? The ford tag is in the same list as bridge or embankment. Would this be an obvious mistake to click? I’ve seen a bridge being changed to ford, that could be a misclick?
This could the same situation I encountered in my area of Thailand. A new mapper was placing highway=ford everywhere that a highway crossed a stream or canal and where there was no bridge or culvert defined. Many times when in a hurry a mapper will skip the task of adding the bridge or may not know what sort of crossing exists. This new mapper was adding fords thinking that if there was no bridge, there must be a ford.
Whether there is also some problem with iD Editor I cannot say because I don’t use it but the tagging of fords jumped out at me when reading this post.
I reported this issue, because in iD where you have a waterway crossing highway, in most cases a culvert should be mapped, but in iD in the first line you have “connect these feautures” which means that the ford will be added. I asked them to move this option not to be the first line but it was rejected.
Oh, sorry, your case was different. There were no crossings with waterways.
Looks like someone didn’t know what they were doing. Ford=yes shouldn’t be added to such long lines like those ones. It can be used with ways but only on small segments where a waterway crosses the road. Usually a node is sufficient. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:ford%3Dyes
Took a look at the first example.
There’s a swimming pool, overlapping the highway.
In version 12, the highway had layer=-1. This was removed in version 13, hence implicit layer=0, i.e. same layer as the swimming pool. As a consequence, there’s a motorway link thru the swimming pool.
Is that a new style of swiss car wash?