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The importance of sidewalks

Posted by ghost_07 on 19 May 2016 in English.

Hi all,

I can see a lot of places on the map in the cities, where there are one way roads, but no sidewalks set. That leads to incorrect pedestrian and bicycle routing in http://openrouteservice.org, osrm, and other navigational software. So please, don’t hesitate drawing ways marked as highway=footway + footway=sidewalk along streets (of course where sidewalks actually exist). I already started doing it in russian cities Moscow and Tula.

Together we’ll create the best map!

Thanks!

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Discussion

Comment from Hjart on 20 May 2016 at 06:39

As far as I’m aware most pedestrian routing ignores oneway on highway=* that are not footway or cycleway.

Also note osm.wiki/Key:oneway#Sub_keys_.2F_exceptions.

Do also note that osm.wiki/Sidewalks#Sidewalk_as_refinement_to_a_highway is often a much better solution than complex networks of separately drawn sidewalks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle).

Comment from ghost_07 on 20 May 2016 at 09:59

Good note, thank you!

Comment from woodpeck on 22 May 2016 at 00:16

I’d like to point out that better pedestrian routing is possible without drawing footways individually; see http://blog.geofabrik.de/?p=356 and the (sadly, German) Bachelor thesis linked from there. This is about a piece of software that generates a pedestrian routing graph from OSM data, by synthesizing pavements/sidewalks as individual edges. Pedestrians will therefore not be routed along the road centreline, but along the left or right side.

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