Barrier = fence

[anonymous]

I often find the need to indicate that there is a fence across (blocking) a path. Barrier=fence seems the obvious way to do this but JOSM does not appear to allow this tag for a single point (or even for a linear object) - only as an area object. But usually the only information is that the path is blocked at the point. It seems clumsy to have to artificially generate a linear fence object - and even this seems impossible at the moment as as soon as there are three points it seems to get treated as an area. Could we extend the tagging barrier=fence to work with points and lines as well as with areas?

[christeck]

According to ​http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:barrier a fence consists of a "way" or area, not a node. I tried it in JOSM, where a way consisting of two nodes only is enough to map a fence.

[anonymous]

OK - I'll try again to see if I can make it work on two nodes. But why can't we have it on a single node like most other barrier= ??

[plaicy]

A fence has always a direction and this is not shown if a node is marked as fence. Maybe there are other reasons why node is not allowed on the wiki page. If you like this to be changed discuss this in the discussion of barrier:fence.

JOSM only follows this in the presets menu:

        <item name="Fence" icon="presets/empty.png" type="way,closedway">
            <link href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier=fence" />
            <key key="barrier" value="fence" />
        </item> <!-- fence -->

If you really need this, create a custom presets and load this in addition. But you also have to change the mappaint style because this show an exclamation mark for all nodes.

In my option a fence-area make no sense. But this is consequent with barrier:wall. This only applies to closed ways.