[Accessibility] Best way to map sidewalks ?

[pierrick pratter]

Thank you Nick Bolten and Anat Caspi for your response,

Thanks for your clarification, I'm part of the French OSM community and my main problem was that there is some cities in France or in others places, some contributors mapped partially on large scales those sidewalks where there is no active local community to maintain or verify them.

Also there is just the French sidewalk article on the OSM wiki that is in French, it has been translated from the English article only recently.
This is also why it is hard to have information on the schema as a French speaker only :)

I updated the French wiki page for [sidewalks](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FR:Trottoirs), with a banner to indicate that the subject is still being worked on by the community, I also added a message in the discussion part of the article to make a point, that these data as to be added and maintained by an active local community to ensure that the data is fully usable and up to date, so, for example, someone that need tools that use these data is not disgusted because the data was added 5 years ago and was never verified nor updated.

I will follow your project more closely as a pedestrian and cyclist, an accurate visualization of the pedestrian network of my city is for sure interesting.

Thanks for your time and the effort that you put in your project and the OSM community

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, January 17, 2021 9:54 PM, Taskar Center <uwtcat at uw.edu> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Its Anat here from OpenSidewalks (through the TaskarCenter).
>
> It’s not actually the case that we haven’t updated the proposal. We made some mods just recently, in fact. The reason we haven’t put it up for voting is because we believe it’s too big for the community to swallow whole- for a vote- but putting through the comprehensive picture in one place was important.
> Proposals should be small and concern with one tag at a time, which is how were approaching this.
> Its also not the case that were not consuming OSM data in accessmap- we are, but we add attributes to it in the backend, like elevation models. So once we pre-can the data, we use it on AccessMap. This does result in some discrepancies between what’s on OSM today, and what you may see on AccessMap.
>
> I should note that Clifford is being modest: after learning about opensidewalks, Clifford went ahead and mapped ALL of Mt. Vernon and made it possible to put up a personalized accessible pedestrian router for Mt. Vernon as well.
> You can find this here: [Mt. Vernon on accessmap.io.](https://www.accessmap.io/?region=wa.mtvernon&lon=-122.3435531&lat=48.4169493&z=14)
> The mt. Vernon data is entirely OSM-derived.
> We are in the process of putting up a new version of HOT Tasking Manager to help cities and regions coordinate the mapping of sidewalks. Where are you mapping? Can we help you with some tools?
>
> We’re a tiny operation (2.5 ppl now) but just got a little USDOT funding to expand this project (literally, just got this 1/15/21) so we hope you’ll see a lot more activity from us in the near future!!
>
> I'm calling out to the rest of you, as well-- Padova, etc, If you believe your region or city is complete, we would love to help you spin up AccessMap for your locale.
>
> contact us at this address.
>
> Thanks!
> Anat @ OpenSidewalks
>
> Sent from my mobile. Please excuse brevity and typos.
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 4:57 PM Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 10:49 AM pierrick pratter via Accessibility <accessibility at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm confuse on the way to add sidewalk data in OSM, it seems that there is two distinct way of mapping them as they are complementary and one should not be wildly used over the other.
>>>
>>> For me the logical and easier way (and maybe easier for routing systems too) is to add the sidewalk tag on the road and if the sidewalk differ or is blocked by a obstacle that is not meant to be cross, I draw the sidewalk and tag it with footway=sidewalk but it is rare as almost all sidewalk in my country (FR) are part of the road.
>>>
>>> So I wanted to have feedback from day to day users of tools that use each kind of mapping and also from developer of those tools, to know in the end which way is the best.
>>
>> I started using the sidewalk as an attribute of the road method of adding sidewalks. When I learned from UW's Taskar Center for Accessible Technology that routing on sidewalks was difficult when the sidewalk was an attribute of the road, I switched to mapping sidewalks as separate objects. Now routers, those specifically built for sidewalks, can successfully find a suitable route for pedestrians. This is particularly helpful for those with limited mobility such as those in a wheelchair. You can learn more at opensidewalks.com, a website the university built to explain their strategy including recommendations for editing in OpenStreetMap. They have a demo router running at AccessMap.io for Seattle, WA. Seattle is a very hilly city that can be difficult to walk up hills even for the average person.
>>
>> Best,
>> Clifford
>>
>> --
>> @osm_washington
>> www.snowandsnow.us
>> OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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