<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><p style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Hi all,<br></span></p><p style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline"><br></span></p><p style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">We've
been drafting a longer response that we wanted to share with everyone
to give more context (for those also following the import list-serve,
there is a separate post there that goes through import-specific
challenges). <br></span></p><p style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline"><br></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Firstly,
thank you to everyone for engaging with such vigorous discussion! We’ve
learned a huge amount about the weaknesses and strengths of our current
proposal.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">We
think it would be helpful to talk about our motivations in posting this
schema, to give the points we’re making some context. We have started
this project with the goal of making sidewalks in OSM more useful for
the greater community, particularly for people with limited mobility.
With its principles of openness and inclusion, OSM is uniquely
positioned to adopt a data model that can make a big difference for
people who use wheelchairs, crutches, or otherwise have difficulties
walking, while also improving the data in the map. We also see this as
an opportunity to get more people mapping and more data about pedestrian
ways into OSM, as the current state of sidewalk coverage is very poor
(and is inconsistently tagged) outside of a few notable cases.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">One
thing that we didn’t make very clear in our initial proposal is that it
is primarily about suggesting standard practices for using existing
tags to describe sidewalks. Almost every tag or feature listed in the
Pedestrian Layer section (</span><a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/sidewalk_schema#Pedestrian_Layer" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(17,85,204);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline">http://wiki.openstreetmap.org<wbr>/wiki/Proposed_features/sidewa<wbr>lk_schema#Pedestrian_Layer</span></a><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">)
is already described in other sections of the wiki with some
description of their semantics, but it is difficult to get a coherent
picture of ‘this is the way to map pedestrian ways’ because they are
distributed in different tagging discussions (sometimes in conflicting
ways). Almost all of the suggested tagging conventions are in use in
some fashion or another. For example, Ilya Zverev pointed out that it’s a
common practice to annotate sidewalks as separate ways in Russia. For
another great example of the potential for impact, the wiki user Species
(very helpful and active on the Talk page!) has mapped sidewalks as
separate ways in Graz, Austria, and has wheelchair routing working with
an OSRM profile: <a href="http://mm.linuxtage.at/osm/routing/wheelchair-electro/?z=19¢er=47.075926%2C15.440831&loc=47.076457%2C15.441271&loc=47.075407%2C15.440565" target="_blank">http://mm.linuxtage.at/osm/rou<wbr>ting/wheelchair-electro/?z=19&<wbr>center=47.075926%2C15.440831&<wbr>loc=47.076457%2C15.441271&loc=<wbr>47.075407%2C15.440565</a>.
And even in locations making heavy use of sidewalk=* on streets, you
will find separately-mapped sidewalks due to important discrepancies
between street shape and sidewalk shape or in order to map features that
are between the sidewalk and the street. So a point we’d like to make
is that many of the concerns raised don’t just apply to a proposal for
tagging in the future - they apply to pedestrian ways that are already
mapped as well. It would be interesting to see examples of how
different regions have coped with the issues raised here (like crossing
streets anywhere), as there may be multiple strategies that already
handle that situation.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">The
introduction to the proposal has been reworded to make the scope
clearer. We will also start annotating which tagging recommendations
constitute something new or different from standards found elsewhere.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">A
big issue that’s been raised is with mapping sidewalks as separate
ways. One of the biggest benefits to this approach is that it is a step
closer to the OSM principle of mapping conditions “on the ground”. It
allows an accurate, elegant tagging scheme for the ground conditions of
sidewalks, whereas current conventions lead to an explosion of tags for
even basic information. Also, by enabling the user to simply add in the
location of intersections and kerb ramps where they see them, it makes
it much more intuitive for the user, particularly new users, to add data
correctly. We hope that making this more intuitive will lead to more
contributions and better coverage of sidewalk data. It also resolves
several visualization concerns (the wiki has been updated to explain
what we mean by this). Finally, treating pedestrian routes as separate
ways is more in line with routing concepts (constituting graph edges).
For examples of how complex tagging would need to be to adequately
describe pedestrian ways using only street lines (and how that graph
would need to be derived anyways, likely with gaps in information),
there is another proposal (<a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/sidepath_tagging_scheme" target="_blank">http://wiki.openstreetmap.org<wbr>/wiki/Proposed_features/sidepa<wbr>th_tagging_scheme</a>, linked on our proposal), as well as the work of Nathanael Lang that was previously mentioned (</span><a href="https://github.com/Nathanael-L/pedro" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(17,85,204);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline">https://github.com/Nathanael-<wbr>L/pedro</span></a><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">).
At first it seems like the street turn lanes problem, but it has the
added complexity of (1) needing to add several annotations to each lane,
(2) the lines may intersect in non-trivial ways, and (3) there are
almost always features located on or between the lanes (kerbs, ramps,
crossings, trees, bollards, grass, bus stops, trash cans, bicycle
paths…).</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">There
are valid concerns that this proposal could affect routing solutions
for those who don't have mobility limitations, and in a related theme, that mapping
sidewalks as separate ways may only be appropriate for specific
geographies and doesn’t scale so well to the rest of the world. The
common challenge can be described as: what happens if I’m in a situation
where I’m able to cross the road wherever if I want to? It would be a
pain, and clearly inefficient if I was routed to the nearest crossing
when I was able to just cross the road. </span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Adding
to that, there have been some concerns that the proposal does not take
European use cases into account - for example, that it would break
routing for users who want to cross the street at any
location, or that mapping sidewalk geometries would be inappropriate for
certain geographies. We would first like to point out that these use
cases also apply in North America, including the U.S., where jaywalking
is allowed in many places (regulations operate at the national, state,
and local levels). This Mapillary photo in Seattle, WA, US is typical of
many residential areas, and has a nearly identical appearance to the
example of Cambridge listed in the talk page of the proposal: </span><a href="https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=47.6924923&lng=-122.3472098&z=17&focus=photo&pKey=50wq0onWI0tm97JK7Z5s5g" style="text-decoration:none" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(17,85,204);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:underline;vertical-align:baseline">https://www.mapillary.com/app/<wbr>?lat=47.6924923&lng=-122.34720<wbr>98&z=17&focus=photo&pKey=50wq0<wbr>onWI0tm97JK7Z5s5g</span></a><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">. Such a user would naturally cross pretty much anywhere there,
and it’s an absolute necessity to walk in the street in areas that
don’t have sidewalks at all (some suburbs, e.g.). As a result, we think
these are universal concerns and would like to account for them.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">In
cases where the distance to the suggested crossing is short and it is
visible where the route continues after the crossing, the user could
just choose to exercise their judgement, ignore the router to cross the
road (hopefully avoiding cars) and pick the route back up once you’ve
crossed. For cases where the distance is significant to the nearest
crosswalk there are at least two further options. You could go ahead and
directly add a way connecting the sidewalk to the street (as things are
currently mapped, in fact), or with a bit of wrangling, you could
structure the router (or pre-process the data) to make cross-street
connections without needing to ‘invisible’ ways to the OSM data layer.
We think it helps to have visuals for these examples, so we’ll be adding
them our wiki shortly, please stick with us!</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">It
would also be really helpful for us if we could have specific examples
of cases where there is a pedestrian routing solution that currently
works for the user that would break with our proposed solution :). To the best of
our knowledge, all of the large-scale routers rapidly fall back to the
street network (ignoring the sidewalk tag) due to the incompleteness of
annotated sidewalks.</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Integrating
separately-mapped sidewalk ways with street centerlines (for cycle
routing, etc) and areas (plazas) are open problems that aren’t actually
specific to mapping sidewalks. There are already numerous pedestrian
ways that need to accomplish both tasks, and they seem to work with
automatic routers. For integrating with streets in particular, this
proposal suggests linking at street crossings and lowered kerb
locations, which happens at regular intervals in cities (and is
addressed in the last paragraph).</span></p><br><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.656;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Associating
sidewalks with a street is a particularly interesting point. This
problem is not very different from how buildings associate with streets
using either addr:street=* tags or an associatedStreet relation, and we
don’t yet have a perfect solution in place (it’s been listed as TBD in
the wiki for a while now). Knowing the associated street is not actually
necessary to make pedestrian routing on sidewalks work much better than
it currently does, particularly for people with limited mobility (and
blind users <a href="http://stateofthemap.us/2016/osm-lights-up-the-world-for-blind-users-with-sound/" target="_blank">http://stateofthemap.us/2016/o<wbr>sm-lights-up-the-world-for-bli<wbr>nd-users-with-sound/</a>),
though it could probably be enhanced with a tag or street relation (see
the Talk page of the proposal for some good discussions on this issue).</span></p><br><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">We’ve tried to address as many concerns as we can, and look forward to more discussions!<br><br></span></div><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Thank you,<br><br></span></div><span style="font-size:13.3333px;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline">Tom, Meg, Jess, Anat, Nick and Kaicheng. </span></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2016-08-04 1:06 GMT-07:00 Marc Gemis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:marc.gemis@gmail.com" target="_blank">marc.gemis@gmail.com</a>></span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class="">On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 3:35 AM, Mike Thompson <<a href="mailto:miketho16@gmail.com">miketho16@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> I tested out the proposed mapping/tagging scheme in my local area<br>
> (<a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/40.49192/-105.05655" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.openstreetmap.org/<wbr>#map=17/40.49192/-105.05655</a> - not claiming I<br>
> did it perfectly). I didn't think it was especially difficult. Drawing the<br>
> additional ways took a little more time, but offered the advantage that you<br>
> received a good visual as to whether all the sidewalks had been correctly<br>
> mapped.<br>
>><br>
>><br>
><br>
<br>
</span>Did you miss the crossing of the Stanton Creek Drive near the<br>
roundabout ? Proves the argument that it is very likely that one will<br>
crossings :-)<br>
And without those extra ways, a router will probably allow you to<br>
cross Tortola way while walking allow Basseterre Place on the south<br>
side. Now it, will have to route you south to the roundabout.<br>
<br>
regards<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
m<br>
</font></span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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