Walking

The walking network holds every way people may walk on, by OSM's access rules. Build it with -m walking (the Monaco sample builds it with driving and cycling):

duckosm build --config config/sample_monaco.yaml

SELECT walk_type, count(*) FROM walking.edges GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC;

Which ways are walkable

The first row that matches decides:

Way	Walkable	Why
highway = motorway, motorway_link	no	OSM forbids walking there, whatever the other tags say
foot = yes / designated / permissive, or sidewalk = yes / both / left / right	yes	an explicit permission or a sidewalk on the road wins over the rows below; a way without a highway tag is kept only if it is a ferry (route=ferry)
motorroad=yes	no	a motorroad (expressway) is closed to people on foot
foot=use_sidepath	no	people must use the path beside it
sidewalk=separate, sidewalk:both=separate, or sidewalk:left and sidewalk:right both separate	no	the sidewalk is its own highway=footway way, which carries the walking: keeping the road too would draw and route each street twice
highway = footway, path, pedestrian, steps, living_street, residential, service, platform, corridor, track, bridleway, road, unclassified, tertiary, secondary, primary, trunk and their _links	yes	OSM's default access lets people walk on them, with or without a sidewalk tag
anything else (cycleway, busway, raceway, …)	no	not for walking unless foot says so

Then the access tags decide, as in every mode (Access): the most specific of foot, access. no leaves the way out; private moves it to walking.private_edges (drawn, never routed). So access=no + foot=yes is walkable.

A way the network leaves out is still in raw.ways. To add or remove one road, use a fix.

walk_type

Every walking edge has a walk_type, from OSM sub-tags. The first rule that matches wins.

walk_type	What it is	From
escalator	moving stairs	highway=steps with conveying
steps	stairs	highway=steps
sidewalk	a footway along a road	highway=footway + footway=sidewalk; or a road with a sidewalk tag (not no / none / separate): you walk its sidewalk
crossing	a crosswalk over a road	highway=footway + footway=crossing
footpath	a footway on its own	any other highway=footway, and anything no rule below matches
plaza	a pedestrian square, drawn as its outline	highway=pedestrian + area=yes
pedestrian_street	a street for people only	highway=pedestrian
shared_street	a street people share with slow cars	living_street
shared_road	a street or road without a sidewalk tag, walked on the carriageway	residential, service, unclassified, road, tertiary, secondary, primary, trunk and their _links
corridor	indoors	highway=corridor, or indoor=yes
platform	a public-transport platform	highway=platform
path	an unpaved or shared way	path, track, bridleway

The full rule: walk_type and cycle_type.

Connector footways

A footway that stops a few metres short of the street it leads to (common in OSM) would be a separate piece, and the component filter would drop it. So the build joins each dangling path end to the nearest node within clip.connect_snap_m (10 m) by a straight two-way connector edge: it has a negative osm_id, the path's highway, and no name.

SELECT count(*) FROM walking.edges WHERE osm_id < 0;   -- Monaco: 496

Details: Connect dangling paths.

Direction, speed, routing

	Walking
One-way	never from oneway or roundabouts: people walk both ways. Only oneway:foot = yes / 1 / true / -1 makes an edge one-way
Speed	5 km/h on every edge (maxspeed_kmh), so cost_s is the walking time
edge_id	the same as the same piece of road in driving and cycling (Stable edge ids)

Route on it with route(con, a, b, mode="walking") or Router(con, mode="walking") (Route). duckosm multimodal joins walking to driving and cycling at every node they share, so a trip can walk to the car, drive and walk on (Routing across modes).

Example: a one-way street

Way 143536279 in Monaco is a short tertiary street between Avenue d'Alsace and Pont Sainte-Dévote, tagged oneway=yes and no sidewalk:

	Before 2026-10-07	Now
driving	2 edges, one-way	2 edges, one-way
walking	not there (a tertiary needed a sidewalk or foot tag)	4 edges, both ways, shared_road, 97 m, cost_s 70 s

Its two walking edges in the drawing direction have the same edge_ids as the driving ones. Avenue de la Porte Neuve (way 159170452, residential, sidewalk=separate) went the other way: it was walkable before and is now only in driving, as its separately mapped sidewalks carry the walking.

On Monaco the rule added 149 roads (61 tertiary, 43 secondary, 35 primary, 9 _links, 1 unclassified) and removed 4 with separate sidewalks: 11,968 walking edges instead of 11,374.