<div dir="auto">One of the nice things about the disabled community is we get a fair amount of data either from them or by people supporting them. As Clifford mentioned this sort of thing is useful to them and as I grow older this sort of information is unfortunately getting more useful to myself.<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Universities can be useful as well although the students do tend to refine the detail on highways etc close the them. In Ottawa a foot bridge I orginally mapped near the University of Ottawa has been updated about thirty times now. On a personal note the building import in Ottawa came from a file that was identified by a University lecturer so Universities can be useful.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">When I look at the map I wonder about the level of detail we have sometimes. Do we really need to know that the surface is asphalt rather than paved?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Personally I'd rather see the data included.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Cheerio John</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Apr 3, 2020, 4:26 PM Martin Chalifoux via Talk-ca, <<a href="mailto:talk-ca@openstreetmap.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">talk-ca@openstreetmap.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">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><br></div><div>I don’t mean this to be inflammatory but just an honest questioning.<br><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Apr 3, 2020, at 15:14, Nate Wessel <<a href="mailto:bike756@gmail.com" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">bike756@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br><div>
<div><p>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>
</p><p>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>
</p><p>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>
</p><p>Best,<br>
</p>
<div><p> Nate Wessel<small>, PhD<br>
Planner, Cartographer, Transport Nerd<br>
<a href="https://www.natewessel.com/" style="text-decoration:none" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">NateWessel.com</a></small>
</p>
</div>
<div>On 2020-04-03 2:49 p.m., Frederik Ramm
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>Hi,
On 4/3/20 19:45, Martin Chalifoux via Talk-ca wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>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>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>
</div>
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