As a response to a proposal to add perceived safety information to OSM (which may or may not be accurate) I was thinking last night about what kind of safety information would be useful and correct.
The county I'm in has a GIS system in which they put "red dots" for every accident that is reported to the police. I also see monitoring devices on the (rural) roads near me all of the time, so unless somebody is doing a master's thesis on my neighborhood, extensive traffic data is available for both the major and minor streets. Periodically the Ithaca Journal runs an article on "The Most Dangerous Roads In Tompkins County", derived from actual accident data. Of course, each of these roads has a story about why it is dangerous, and that's particularly useful to travelers. For instance, a rpad near me is on an exposed hilltop (gets covered with snowdrifts in the winter) and has a 90 degree turn. There's also a plateau just north of Cornell that has several roads that go up a steep incline. Some of these have hairpin turns that often accumulate multiple stuck and crashed cars during winter storms... And if you think that's bad, try the one that goes straight up the hill and seems to get several tractor trailers stuck in it every year [despite the sign that tells trucks not to enter] Generally it seems that traffic engineers in Upstate NY like building unusual intersections -- I can think of many interstate intersections around Albany and Binghamton that baffled me the first time I saw them, and there's a particular approach to Ithaca in which traffic on the left is supposed to yield to traffic on the right. All of these intersections "make sense" when you look at the big picture of traffic flow, but many people get confused when they see them infrequently, and sometimes they do the wrong things. It seems to me that it would be useful to mark particular hazards and give people enough information that they can understand the curveballs along routes. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk