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<p>Martin, <br>
</p>
<p>Why wouldn't you consider university groups a part of the
community? I think it's quite valid to worry about the motive and
commitment of groups that have a pure profit motive for working on
OSM, but I wouldn't think of universities first. There are lots of
actual for-profit companies like Mapbox or TeleNav that have
stronger and more driving incentives, and larger workforces making
edits on their behalf. Not to say that they are evil either..<br>
</p>
<p>Personally, I've been paid to edit OSM once before. I got $1,000
to survey and map Toronto's PATH network for a small company when
I first moved to Canada. I had a lot of fun doing it. I haven't
kept it up since then, but I can certainly say that I left the
PATH in a better state than I found it. The work was done
(explicitly) to benefit a handful of people, but who was harmed? I
added elevators, escalators, stairs, ramps, food courts and a
hundred other little things that will never trouble the 'average
user'. <br>
</p>
<p>The beauty of OSM to me is that it has no one purpose. There is
no one reason that we're doing this. One person might want good
walking directions, another might want to know where bookshops
are, and on and on ad infinitum. The bookshops don't get in the
way of the walking directions. They don't necessarily add
complexity, but they do allow for it if one wants to go down that
road. <br>
</p>
<p>If anyone thinks the map is too complex, I would remind them that
there is no such thing as "the map". There's a database with a ton
of crazy stuff in it and there are maps that render aspects of
that database, or allow interaction with them. If you don't like
any of the OSM maps you've seen so far, you are free to make one
that you do like. I've done that before too and I can tell you it
was immensely satisfying :-)</p>
<p>Best,<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-signature">
<p> Nate Wessel<small>, PhD<br>
Planner, Cartographer, Transport Nerd<br>
<a href="https://www.natewessel.com"
style="text-decoration:none;">NateWessel.com</a></small>
</p>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2020-04-03 4:25 p.m., Martin
Chalifoux wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:E707D1CB-EA42-4E53-8ED9-A34182B56E29@icloud.com">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Nate, when reading this and other comments I try to figure who
puts those sidewalks in and to the benefit of what users. From
what I can see it is being done by university groups essentially,
not the community. The beneficiaries are organizations that funds
those groups with strings attached, essentially buying a service.
The OSM mass of end-users is not it appears the beneficiary but
rather a very small group of people. I thus ask very honestly are
the universities hijacking OSM to execute their research projects
just because it is there, free and easily usable ? Are OSM users
ever a concern ? With regards to this specific sidewalk mapping
effort I really have a hard time figuring how a mainstream OSM
user, through the site or a mobile app, benefits in any way from
this added layer or complexity. I tend to think to the contrary is
makes the map overly complex, add information nobody will ever
care about, render the experience cumbersome, that with no
tangible gain. If that was the case I don’t think that would be
right.
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">I don’t mean this to be inflammatory but just an
honest questioning.<br class="">
<div><br class="">
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class="">On Apr 3, 2020, at 15:14, Nate Wessel <<a
href="mailto:bike756@gmail.com" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">bike756@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<div class="">
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charset=UTF-8" class="">
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<p class="">I used to be opposed to sidewalk mapping,
and I still think it is often done poorly. I've
changed my mind in the last year or two though. When I
first moved into my current neighborhood and started
mapping the area, I hated at all the poorly drawn
sidewalks. They weren't well aligned, they didn't do
anything to indicate crossings, and they were far from
complete. For a while I was temped to delete the lot
of them, but instead worked to gradually fix them up,
noted marked or signalized crossings, added in traffic
islands, pedestrian barriers etc. <br class="">
</p>
<p class="">Once you have a high-quality, relatively
complete mapping of sidewalks, I really think they add
a lot of value. You can see where sidewalks end, where
crossings are absent, how long crossings are, whether
there is separation from other traffic by e.g. fence
or bollards. <br class="">
</p>
<p class="">It's not just about routing. Sidewalks (and
crossings) are infrastructure in their own right and
deserve to be mapped as such, at least in many dense
urban areas, and especially where they vary
significantly from street to street. I'm not saying it
should be done everywhere, but it definitely does have
value in some places. <br class="">
</p>
<p class="">Best,<br class="">
</p>
<div class="moz-signature">
<p class=""> Nate Wessel<small class="">, PhD<br
class="">
Planner, Cartographer, Transport Nerd<br class="">
<a href="https://www.natewessel.com/"
style="text-decoration:none;" class=""
moz-do-not-send="true">NateWessel.com</a></small>
</p>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2020-04-03 2:49 p.m.,
Frederik Ramm wrote:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:d1ce791d-55ee-3798-b53b-daa75e888c93@remote.org"
class="">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Hi,
On 4/3/20 19:45, Martin Chalifoux via Talk-ca wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">This morning I checked some large cities namely New-York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin. Since OSM is best developed in Europe these capitals make sense. I just checked Tokyo, Shangai, Seoul, Sydney to sample Asia. None of them have this sidewalk mapping as separate ways.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">There are pockets here and there in Europe as well. Mostly what happens
is this:
1. Someone wants to make a cool pedestrian/wheelchair/schoolkid routing
project
2. The person or team has limited programming capability or budget, and
hence must attack the problem with a standard routing engine
3. Standard routing engines do not have the capability to infer a
sidewalk network from appropriately tagged streets (i.e. even if the
street has a tag that indicates there's sidewalks left and right, the
routing engine will not generate individual edges and hence cannot do
something like "follow left side of X road here, then cross there, then
follow right side" or so
4. Hence, tons of sidewalks (and often also pseudo-ways across plazas)
are entered into OSM, to "make the routing work".
(5. often people will then find that the routing engine generates
instructions like "follow unnamed footway for 1 mile" which leads them
to copy the road's name onto the sidewalk geometry... to "make the
routing work").
(6. In some countries a pedestrian is allowed to cross a street
anywhere. Happily I haven't yet encountered people cris-crossing the
streets with footway connections to "make the routing work" in these
countries. If you're in a country where you are only allowed to cross at
marked crossings then that is easier.)
All this is a sad state of affairs; if we had routing engines that could
work well with simple "sidewalk" tags (and also make standard
assumptions about which road types in which countries would usually have
sidewalks even if not explicitly tagged), then we could save ourselves a
*lot* of separately mapped sidewalks that really do not add valuable
information, and just serve as crutches for routing engines.
Personally I am very much opposed to the separate mapping of sidewalks,
though I recognize that unless we have routing engines that work without
these crutches, I will have a hard time convincing people to stop doing
that.
Bye
Frederik
</pre>
</blockquote>
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