[OSM-newbies] Pavements, pedestrian crossings, road widths, house numbers, parking restrictions, speed limits, public transport timetables

[Sam Kuper]

On 17 March 2011 12:04, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 7:47 AM, Sam Kuper <sam.kuper at uclmail.net> wrote:
> > Dear all,
> > I'd like to be able to use OpenStreetMap to compare different ways of
> > travelling from a given street address to another given street address.
>
> We have several routing libraries.
>

Thanks, but do any of them take into account things like:

   - which is the optimal side of the road for a pedestrian to walk on?
   - where the pedestrian should cross roads in order to avoid breaking
   jaywalking laws?
   - where the pavement ramps are located in order to allow wheelchair users
   to cross roads?
   - which side of the road a bus stop is on?
   - bus/train/tram timetables?
   - whether it's possible to park a car at the stated destination, or
   whether one must instead park somewhere else nearby (if so, where?) and walk
   the rest of the way?

If not, I may have to write my own, which is more or less what I was
expecting to have to do.

> At the moment, this doesn't seem to be practical, at least not with much
> > rigour, because some important entities seem to be missing from the maps,
> > including the entities mentioned in the subject of this email. (If I'm
> > mistaken about any of this, please set me straight!)
>
> Unfortunately, you didn't paste the items you're asking about in the
> mail, but I'll respond to each from the subject.
>
> * Pavements
>
> I don't know what you mean by pavements. Do you mean sidewalks and
> pedestrian walkways?
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pedestrian
>
> Both have available tags (and I'm hopefully going to announce
> something on this soon, let's hope).
>

A pavement is a sidewalk, yes.

Now, I see from your link that pedestrianised streets and squares are
handled by OpenStreetMap, but I don't see any examples of roads having
pavements alongside them. The implication is that as far as OpenStreetMap is
concerned, pedestrians share the road surface equally with cars, trucks,
bikes, buses, motorbikes and so on, which is not normally the case in the
countries I've visited. In the countries I've visited, pedestrians normally
walk on pavements alongside the road surface, while the other vehicles I've
mentioned use the main road surface.

In rural areas in Swaziland, China, Zimbabwe, France, the USA and the UK,
and in some rare urban cases too, one encounters roads with pavements only
on one side, or on neither side. Routing pedestrians along such roads would
be inappropriate, but unless the presence or absence of pavements is
represented somehow, how could one expect a routing algorithm to make a
sensible choice?



> > pedestrian crossings
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Crossing


Ah, that's good to know. I didn't see any marked on the area of OSM that I
looked at, where there should have been some, but presumably they just need
to be added.


> > road widths
>
> Road widths are something we've traditionally not put on the map
> because OSM is more focused on toplogical connectivity than actual
> road width. We do have the number of lanes, so one can extrapolate an
> approximate width from this value where available.
>

This doesn't really make sense to me. After all, the shape of a pavement
isn't a line, and nor is the shape of a road. Both are areas that can be
traversed more or less freely, as long as one doesn't obstruct them nor (in
some cases) travel in the wrong direction on certain parts of them.

A width, expressed in a standard unit of length, I can understand. But what
counts as a lane?

For instance, on a road in the UK where I lived for some years, there were
typically cars parked (entirely legally) on both sides, which left room for
only one car abreast to drive along the road: if two cars were driving along
the road and wanted to pass each other, then one of the cars had to pull
into a parking space to let the other one past.

The road was therefore wide enough for three cars abreast, but since the
cars on either side of the road were normally stationary (parked), that sort
of reduced the effective width of the road to one car. How many lanes would
this road have, as far as OSM is concerned? One, or three?

NB. I think that as far as the local council is concerned, this road has two
lanes, since they've painted a dashed white line down the middle of it;
despite the fact that because of the parked cars, it's impossible to drive
down the road without straddling this line!


> > house numbers
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Addresses


It's nice to see the examples in Karlsruhe. However, in the UK I haven't yet
found any areas I'm familiar with that have buildings individually drawn on
the map with addresses assigned.

Are there plans to import addresses in bulk, or is it expected that these
will be inputted by hand? How were the examples around this location
created?
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.030752&lon=8.361616&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF


> > parking restrictions
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Parking
> (read the section on the access tag)
>

Thanks.

In the UK, there are several different designations that local councils
apply to given stretches along the sides of given roads. For instance, they
may have double red lines, single red lines, double yellow lines, single
yellow lines, parking bays of various kinds (pay & display; residents only;
disabled only; etc), any of a number of other markings, or no markings at
all. Typically, councils will publish information about at least some of
these stretches on their websites, to help people plan their journeys.

It would be very useful to be able to represent this information in OSM. Can
it be done?

> speed limits
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:maxspeed


I downloaded a .osm file for an area of London I know quite well, and it
contained no maxspeed tags even though most of the streets in it are subject
to an implicit 30mph speed limit.

Are there plans to automatically tag urban streets with national urban
street limits, or is this something that users are expected to do manually
for the entire world?


> > public transport timetables
>
> Public transportation timetables are outside the scope of the project,
> and were part of another project called Transiki, which is,
> unfortunately, apparently abandoned. I'm sure if you had the technical
> knowhow and interest, Steve would happily hand the project over to a
> new maintainer.
>

Beyond my capabilities at the moment, but I'm glad to hear that there has
been work done in this direction. After all, there's little point, from a
journey planning point of view, in recording the location of a bus stop
without knowing whether/when it is served by buses, where those buses go and
how long they're expected to take to get there.


> > Are there any plans to introduce any of these entities into
> OpenStreetMap?
>
> The keys for most are already available. It's up to the community to
> collect the data and enter it.
>

Thanks again,

Sam
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