[Talk-ca] Tagging sidewalks as separate ways and issues with bicycle routing

Fri Apr 3 21:00:33 UTC 2020

Martin,

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..

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'.

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.

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 :-)

Best,

Nate Wessel, PhD
Planner, Cartographer, Transport Nerd
NateWessel.com <https://www.natewessel.com>

On 2020-04-03 4:25 p.m., Martin Chalifoux wrote:
> 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.
>
> I don’t mean this to be inflammatory but just an honest questioning.
>
>> On Apr 3, 2020, at 15:14, Nate Wessel <bike756 at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:bike756 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Nate Wessel, PhD
>> Planner, Cartographer, Transport Nerd
>> NateWessel.com <https://www.natewessel.com/>
>>
>> On 2020-04-03 2:49 p.m., Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On 4/3/20 19:45, Martin Chalifoux via Talk-ca wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>> 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
>>>
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