On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 10:46 AM Martin Chalifoux via Talk-ca < talk-ca@openstreetmap.org> 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. I however > found a bit of that scheme in San-Francisco. I am not sure where this idea > is coming from, who is backing this implementation and who it does service > to, but it sure is a mess in many ways. And when the people adding that > stuff will go away, who will maintain that complexity, the volunteers ? The > use of tags as you suggest would be much cleaner and easier. The OSM > database is used by a large community of navigation apps that will all have > to deal with this one way or another to still provide meaningful navigation > prompts that are not just like “walk on path, in 100m turn left on path, in > 300m turn right on path", perhaps by filtering out these ways from their > apps, I really don’t know. Otherwise everybody will move to Google Maps > which sure won’t bother with that stuff. Anyhow, have to go back to > self-quarantine, I feel a fever :-) > I'm one of those that map sidewalks as separate ways. I started mapping sidewalks as road attributes but was frustrated by the connection at intersections. While mapping sidewalks as separate ways does add to the density of urban areas, there is some beauty to its completeness. The University of Washington Taskar Center for Accessibility pushed the schema [1] and developed a demonstration website https://AccessMap.io for Seattle. Their purpose was to help people with limited mobility navigate streets, hills and curb ramps. Seattle is a good example of where it's needed. Hills are steep and not all intersections have curb ramps making life difficult for people in wheelchairs or like myself who hate climbing those steep streets :-) Moving to Google Maps doesn't help someone in a wheelchair. Their routing for pedestrians includes stairs and doesn't consider steepness or curb ramps. Guess there is no money in it. As to bicycles using sidewalks, I add bicycle=yes + separated=* when it's designated on the street otherwise I leave it to city regulations and norms to decide if the sidewalk can be used for cyclists. Although I did have a discussion with county and state personnel about a new roundabout. I had the bike route using the roundabout since the bike route was on the highway. The state and county wanted the cyclist to get off the highway and take the pedestrian footways to bypass the roundabout. I mapped it the way they wanted, but my guess is the cyclists will just use the roundabout. Best, Clifford [1] opensidewalks.com -- @osm_washington www.snowandsnow.us OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch
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