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 <bike...@gmail.com
<mailto:bike...@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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