I spent most of my time today adding sidewalks in the area of Waterloo where my parents live, basically in an area boxed by Brookridge Drive, Kimball Avenue, Ridgeway Avenue, and 9th Street. There are some other areas of Waterloo that have sidewalks and crossings mapped, but they tend to be near downtown which, while useful, is a small percentage of the sidewalks that exist in Waterloo.

I actually haven’t been in the area since Easter weekend, but between the satellite imagery and my own memory I think I did a reasonable job mapping the sidewalks and crossings. I actually didn’t know about putting a node where a sidewalk/crossing and the road it’s crossing intersect until I got well into it, but I’m glad I went back and read the OSM Wike entry on Key:crossing as I hadn’t been creating the intersecting nodes until I did. I haven’t seen the results in OsmAnd yet (which is where I’ve seen crossings here in Champaign), but I’m pretty sure they’ll show up now that I’ve added them.

Admittedly part of the reason why I’m mapping these sidewalks is to direct some attention to where there aren’t sidewalks in Waterloo, but in my opinion there should be. A good example is here where the sidewalk on the north side of Park Lane ends after the Kimball Avenue access road crossing, but then starts again by Brockway Road, the next street to the west, only to end again at Colby Road. Gaps like this exist all over southern Waterloo, forcing pedestrians to either cross twice to stay on the sidewalk, move onto the street, or cut through the grass where the gap is. I’m hoping that by mapping the sidewalks I can highlight these gaps and maybe motivate people still living there to get them filled in.