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 separate to 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

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

@UW Amy Bordenave Thanks for the offer! I will reinstall slack and join up with y’all!

@Pieter Vander Vennet As soon as I posted my response, I was like “wait how would a description help an application with deciding what door to use” and noticed that I misunderstood where you were going with that haha

I like the approach of viewing accessibility as a routing problem. I had viewed it more from a desireability lens (ex. making the decision of destination based on available accommodation.) So I had approached tagging based on what information would help someone make that decision with as much information as possible. But viewing it from a routing pov makes more sense because it allows a user to pick an option that best suits their needs, regardless of what their destination is. After all, maybe someone really needs to get to a shop on the second floor and feels it’s worth it to go through a different building – and in that case, just saying “sorry second floor doesnt meet accessibility requirements” isn’t a helpful answer to them. The user can make the call based on what route is calculated as meeting their needs, instead of making the call on the data end. I think that makes sense.

I’ve been mapping the indoors of a local library to get my feet wet on indoor mapping and using some accessibility tags (not gonna try the mall for now cuz it’s much too big for my comfort at the moment). Once I have a complete version of the building, I might post a diary about it and ask your thoughts on it!

@Glassman Will do! That’s a cool project. Regina isn’t particularly hilly (that’s the prairies for ya haha) so there probably are fewer elevation challenges for us. But I still think there’s value in separately mapped sidewalks so that surface quality can be reported separately for a road versus sidewalk. That is a challenge for us because our soil here makes features shift rapidly, so you can see a difference in maintenance between roads and sidewalks.

@Pieter Vander Vennet That’s an interesting point. I have been doing more wheelchair:description:en on my features to describe what’s happening. Would be interesting to see this question pop up on SCEE so I can do descriptions in the field (so far I either save it for when im home and go off memory, or use show tags and do it live). That’s an interesting solution. I didn’t consider using indoor mapping and treating the doors themselves as nodes with accessibility features. I might have to think about how I’d go about making an indoor map of the mall I’m thinking of!

I’ve seen that sort of situation too! Our local map hasn’t gotten to mapping sidewalks as separate from road features at large (though that is something that I have been strongly considering as of late – it would make mapping differences in sidewalk surface quality versus road surface quality more straightforward). Guess I’ll have to be on the lookout for t intersections when I get started with it.