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

[SomeoneElse]

On 17/03/2011 12:55, Sam Kuper wrote:
> ...
> 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.

As they used to say on Blue Peter, here's one I prepared earlier:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/44976968

See:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Footway
for the documentation.  Ignore the "Proposed" bit of the link, that's 
just wikibollocks.

> 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.

Strictly speaking no, it means that OSM doesn't know because no-one has 
collected the data.  Routers may well decide that where 
footway=no/left/right/both isn't available that people can still walk 
from A to B (in UK cities pavements are so common that they tend to get 
assumed by mappers I think).

> 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?
>
It was the lack of roadside pavements near where I lived that prompted 
me to start recording them near where I live.  This is a "lack of data" 
problem rather than a "how could we represent that data" problem, which 
rather comes back to what Richard said at the end of his reply:

"So my specific advice to you, about extending OpenStreetMap with this 
data, is for you to go out and do your first survey for OpenStreetMap."

Cheers,
Andy