Street Select Tool

Press S or click the Select tool , then click a link on the map. Clicking a junction instead opens a different panel, covered in Junctions and Turn Restrictions.

Reading the link card

The card at the top shows the street name, which you can click to rename, and the link's identifier. If the link came from OpenStreetMap, the identifier is a link that opens the same object on openstreetmap.org.

Two badges appear when they apply. A link drawn in this session is marked New link . A link queued for deletion is marked deleted, and its fields lock until you restore it. Whenever the selection has unpublished edits, a red discard button appears in the card to roll them back.

Below the card sits a read-only access chip (e.g. ) summarising who can currently use the link, with an icon per mode and "(timed)" appended when the restriction only applies at certain times. It is a summary of the tags underneath, so it updates as you edit.

Highway class and direction

Two fields sit at the top of the editor:

• Highway class is what kind of road this is, from Motorway down to Footway, plus Busway, Cycleway, Path and Pedestrian. It sets the default access for every mode, so changing it is the single biggest change you can make to a link.
• Direction is whether traffic runs both ways, one way along the link, or one way against it. One-way links show direction arrows on the map.

Access by mode

A row per mode: All motor, Bus, Bike and Foot. Each is set to Yes, No, or Private (or left at its default).

The default is worked out from the highway class and any other tags you have set, and shown in the field, for example "Yes (default)" or "No (default)". Hovering over it explains where that default came from, so you can see whether a footpath is closed to cars because you closed it or because footpaths are closed to cars anyway. You only need to set a mode explicitly when you want to override the default.

When a mode is allowed, a second row appears beneath it for the detail that only makes sense if it is:

Set a mode to No and its extra field disappears, along with the tag behind it, so you cannot leave a bus lane recorded on a street buses cannot use.

Cross-section, surface and other tags

Cross-section and surface holds width, surface, smoothness, street lighting and incline. The router uses surface and smoothness for calculations, where for example, a rough or unpaved surface slows cycling down or rules it out entirely.

All tags holds everything else the link carries, as a key and value list you can add to. Use it for anything the fields above do not cover, such as bridge and tunnel tags or a time window other than the standard school-street one. Note that the additional tag you may add may not reflect routing, but can be used for bulk selection, filtering, and even in some Insight analyses like the Street Catchment analysis.

If you are unsure what a tag means, every field has an information button explaining what it does to routing and linking to the OpenStreetMap reference for that tag.

Applying an intervention with a preset

Presets apply a complete, consistent set of access rules in one click. Choose one from Apply preset… and click Apply. They work on a single link or on a bulk selection.

A preset is an action, not a label. Applying one sets the access rules it owns and clears any conflicting ones, so the result is the same whatever the link looked like before. Podaris confirms with "applied", or tells you it "is already in effect" if nothing needed changing.

Placing crossings and signals

Place feature… adds a point feature to the selected link: a pedestrian crossing, traffic signals, a stop sign, or a give way. Choose the type, then click the point on the link where it belongs. The feature is spliced into the road at the next rebuild.

To set the control at a point where links already meet, use the junction's own type setting instead. See Junctions and Turn Restrictions.

Reshaping a link

Drag a junction to move it, and the links attached to it follow. Drag one junction onto another and Podaris joins them into a single junction instead, which is how you connect two roads that only appear to meet. 

You can also drag a point along a link to insert a new vertex and bend it.

Editing many links at once

There are three ways to build a selection, and all of them lead to the same panel.

• Shift-click links on the map to add or remove them one at a time.
• Select by area: choose the rectangle or polygon button at the top of the panel, then outline the area on the map. The dropdown next to the shape buttons controls whether links merely touching the area are included.
  
• Select by attribute: in the overflow menu , search for links by tag, for example every link where the highway class is residential.
  

The panel then shows how many links are selected and the same editing fields as a single link, with blanks where the selection disagrees. Anything you change, including presets, applies to every selected link as one undo step. Delete N links, or just pressing Delete, marks them all for deletion in one step.

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