OpenStreetMap
This week I added tagging to the Regina area for the following:
- Presence / location of sidewalks
- Presence / location of on street parking
- Number of road lanes
- Turn lane designations
None of this gets rendered on any of the default map layers, so the map doesn’t look any different. It could be helpful for routing software. For cycling I prefer to avoid roads that don’t have a parking lane. I also prefer to turn left at intersections that have a dedicated lane and not be stopped in a driving lane relying on drivers behind me paying attention.
The Lane and Road Attributes, and Sidewalks map paint styles in JOSM are very helpful in visually confirming the tags are added correctly. For bidirectional ways you need to pay attention to the direction arrow to determine whether to use turn:lanes:forward or turn:lanes:backward.
Discussion
Kommentaar van Malle_Yeno op 15 Julie 2025 om 20:53
Heya! Sorry to necro on a diary entry from 4 years ago like this, but just saw this and it touched on sidewalks in the local area which has been something I’ve been thinking on.
I’ve been considering adding sidewalks as separate geometry for Regina instead of an attribute to the road. I know that this has been done in some parts of the city (I think I’ve seen a few bits of Normanview have it mapped separately) and was considering whether to start expanding that. I was thinking it might be useful for separately mapping surface conditions between sidewalks and roads (I’ve seen many cases where the road is in okay condition but the sidewalk is in disrepair).
Since you’ve already done a lot of work for tagging sidewalks around here, I wanted to ask your thoughts on whether that’s a direction I should go in
Kommentaar van gecho111 op 16 Julie 2025 om 02:48
If you want to map sidewalk conditions I guess it makes sense to have the sidewalks mapped separately. Also where there is a grass strip between the sidewalk and curb (in a few areas it is set back quite a ways). In that case sometimes pathways connect to the sidewalk first and the ramp to the road might be offset by 10 feet from the path. Since roadway width varies considerably the sidewalk can be very far from the road center line. There are also a few spots where the sidewalks diverge from the road.
The tags should be removed from the road once the sidewalks are mapped separately. It is very easy to do with the josm desktop editor as you can set a filter to show only roads and quickly select many to update at once.
The extra nodes can make keeping everything in alignment tricky when straightening roads.
When a user in The Creeks first started doing that I caused an issue with my bike gps map, but I was able to filter them out. Back then routing software I was using kept routing onto the sidewalk for cycling which was annoying, but they fixed that.
Kommentaar van Malle_Yeno op 16 Julie 2025 om 14:40
Thanks for the considerations! I know that along (I think it’s?) Pinkie road that there’s a pathway that is very offset from the road that makes it tricky to determine whether that’s an absence of a sidewalk or just a trail that acts double duty.
Good tip on JOSM, thanks! I have plenty to learn with that, haha, I’ll look into how to apply filters like that. I have gotten used to selections and editing attrs on multiple features, so I’ll be sure to apply
separateto the roads that I map the sidewalks on.I’m also thinking to map crossing nodes and that sort of thing, which I’m hoping will help with detecting when sidewalks are impacted by roadways edits.
Which GPS map was doing that? That seems like odd behaviour for a cycling router imo
Kommentaar van gecho111 op 16 Julie 2025 om 19:39
The map I was using was one I generated myself using OSM data. The router was on the ridewithgps route planner.
The city does its own high resolution aerial imagery every 2 years with the most recent being last year. They take the pictures in the spring before the leaves open which makes it easier to see stuff on the ground.
https://opengis.regina.ca/basicviewer/viewer.html?basemap=2020
You can change years using the Basemap Select button in the lower right going back to 2009 and also 1951. On the left there is a button called Pictometry lets you see images taken diagonally from north east south and west (using the compass). The diagonal views are useful for things on the ground that you can’t quite make out in the overhead. The pictometry viewer can be a bit clunky but might be useful for surveying fine details.
The neat thing about using the JOSM editor is that you can use the the high resolution imagery as a background layer for editing. In the imagery preferences you need to create a new WMS entry and add this url to the get capabilities box. https://opengis.regina.ca/arcgis/services/Imagery/Airphoto_Regina_2024_7_5cm/ImageServer/WMSServer?request=GetCapabilities&service=WMS