@Stereo I’m (mis)using the Mapnik “casing” to show a “sidewalk” on both sides of the road. I’ve no idea whether it’s possible to have a casing on only one side of a way, and if so how hard to do it would be. The “lua” side is pretty straightforward - instead of “tertiary_sidewalk” and “tertiary” you’d have “tertiary_left_sidewalk”, “tertiary_right_sidewalk” and “tertiary”. Of course, the more important information is “you can safely walk here” rather than “and it’s on the left as you go north”.

The router I use most often is the built-in Garmin eTrex one. Ages ago I did have a go at producing a Garmin map for “foot only use” (on it motorways weren’t usable roads, for example), using a version of the C# preprocessor that I used already. It sort-of worked but wasn’t ideal, since you couldn’t use the same .img for e.g. car routing too.

I’ve not looked at OSRM et al, but as I understand it if you run your own instance of that it’s highly configurable (see https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/wiki/Profiles ). It wouldn’t surprise me if you could persuade it (or some other online router) to support sidewalk tags.

Re the “getting it online” bit - a quick and dirty Leaflet/Mapnik approach would be to use a lua script together with the existing “OSM Carto” style or a variation of it to display the data using existing tags.

https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/designation-style is an example of that, not with “paved”, but with “designation” (which is used in England and Wales to indicate specific kinds of public access). It dates from when “highway=path” and “highway=footway” were rendered differently by “OSM Carto” - paths and footways with a designation are rendered as “footway”, and paths and footways without as “path”.

If you read through the github issues for the standard style there are a lot of comments saying “we can’t do that because XYZ key isn’t in the rendering database”. Using lua avoids that problem; it can act on any key/value combination in the data being loaded.

All I can suggest is to comment on the discussions on the changesets concerned - explain what the problem is, what they did wrong, and how you’d have done it. Say that you’re local and offer to check anything they want the next time you’re in the area of (whatever it is).

If you can and if appropriate, add changeset discussion comments in a language that the author is likely to speak as well as yours (even a Bing Transator or similar translated text is better than nothing).

If they don’t reply after a week or so, explain again that it’d be really nice if they did reply, pointing out if necessary that you’re another OSM mapper who just happens to live in the area; you’re not some disembodied “system error message”.

If that doesn’t work and you still have a problem contact the Data Working Group at [email protected] (disclaimer: I’m a member) and we can try suggest that they really ought to engage with you, and can take further steps if necessary.

Obviously I’ve no idea what the “project team” was that prompted you to write this diary entry, but I suspect that “team mapping” will be more prevalent not less as we go forward. Several companies who widely use OSM data have mapping teams, and there are lots of other “mapping projects” using OSM data. The quality of mapping from people on these teams varies, just like it does from other OSM mappers. Some “project team” mappers have been OSM contributors of long standing before starting their current team membership; others seem to have no knowledge of OSM and seem to have been picked up via an ad-hoc jobs board. In most cases the wider OSM community gets them “trained” eventually. The most common mistake “team leaders” (or whatever sort) make is forgetting that OSM is a community more than it is a project. If you come in and add any old rubbish to the data people will comment on it and fix it.

“And here goes John Smith, who indirectly claims, that he knows how OSM newbies think and so on, when he refers to them. No, he knows almost nothing. “

So you’re assuming that people making statements about what does and doesn’t work for new mappers haven’t ever investigated what works or not?

Do you have any evidence for that assumption?

Excellent stuff! As someone who regularly walks between towns when the weather doesn’t really allow the use of footpaths etc., I find mapped footpaths far more useful than addresses :)

@jinalfoflia “last edited within a year” is about the threshold that I’d use for messaging previous mappers too.

Do you have any idea how many of the picnic sites in, say, the UK are as yet unmapped (there are now 1632 there according to http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/tags/?key=tourism&value=picnic_site , you changed 15 in changeset/36125857 ).

Also how many of the things that are currently tagged as tourism=picnic_site do you think are mistagged?

I reckon that it’s almost always possible to figure out what even “incomprehensible” tags actually mean (or at least what the mapper was trying to do at the time). A while back SimonPoole mentioned “yes=no”: https://twitter.com/sp8962/status/643894726366789632 . I had a look at those, and even something with something as nonsensical as that it was possible to figure out the meaning (e.g. a mapper was trying to change tiger:reviewed=no to tiger:reviewed=yes). That’s part of the reason why I find “tagfiddlers” (people who just remove tags that they don’t understand, without asking the previous mapper) annoying.

On the more general point about source tags, if you really do use only one source for an entire changeset then it might make sense to use a changeset source tag (and when I do, that’s what I do) but most of the time the source of anything is much more complicated (for me usually some combination of notes, new GPS traces, previous GPS traces, imagery and government open data). That’s when I find element source tags useful.

Just to comment on the “better we upload all the data in english” reply…

As an English speaker, if I’m visiting somewhere where signposts primarily aren’t in English (or are even in a non-Latin script) I’d actually prefer names on a map to match the signposts, rather than be a translation of the local name.

To take an example that I’m familiar with (in Sweden), way/20278673 is referred to by everyone as the “Centralbron”, and from memory it’s signposted as that. In OSM someone’s added a “name:en” of “Central Bridge” (that’s just the English translation - I’ve never seen it signposted, although it was a while since I was there). In order for “Central Bridge” to be useful to me I’d actually need to be able to translate the English into Swedish, and then compare that with the signposts. That’s actually more work than just having what’s on the signposts on the map, even if I don’t speak Swedish.

The bit I don’t understand is “… So, I must go along with the community”. I don’t understand what benefit there is to using an artificially circular way as opposed to a node (at least if way_area isn’t going to be used to determine size - which if the examples on this page are anything to go by, it couldn’t be reliably). Surely (while there are still things to be map) the benefits of mapping throughput would outweigh the prettiness of overnoded ways?

I’m sure that there are map styles (if not public map tiles) that take trail_visibility into account. For my own use I maintain a map style designed for hiking in England and Wales, and that drops non-designated(1) low-visibility highways:

https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L115

I personally wouldn’t use OpenStreetMap’s “standard style” as a hiking map. We have in the past had complaints such as https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/20339/gordale-scar-malham-yorkshire-footpath . The mapping of way/43323982 was actually excellent, but the standard style couldn’t convey the likely problems to users.

(1) That’s an England-and-Wales thing - don’t worry about it elsewhere.

You’ve probably seen it already, but just in case not - should be fixed now:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-December/075245.html

As an aside, @Vincent%20de%20Phily - one of the reasons that I personally don’t use JOSM for “normal” mapping is that I capture everything in a GPX trace (most information as waypoints), and it’s difficult or impossible to do anything useful with that information in JOSM. There are a bunch of questions that I asked about this sort of thing ages ago - see the questions at https://help.openstreetmap.org/users/387/someoneelse that are unanswered (or have an answer of “you can’t”) and are tagged JOSM. It’s possible that JOSM functionality has caught up since those were asked, of course. The main problem for me though is that JOSM’s default UI just makes simple things (e.g. seeing object tags, viewing relations in the map view) very difficult or clumsy to do. I suspect that it might be able possible to play around with CSS to address some of the “what things look like” issues, but I’ve never needed to fix the problems as for me a better alternative already exists.

@ksetdekov It depends on location, really. In many places in the world for pedestrian routing it makes no sense to map separate sidewalks and crossings because there are no explicit crossings - you’re allowed to cross anywhere.

Where it gets complicated is where there are multiple sets of users, for example (1) pedestrians, who can and do cross anywhere (for whom sidewalk=none/left/right/both on the road is the best tagging) and (2) wheelchair and mobility scooter users who have to navigate by dropped kerbs, which may be at junctions or may not, and don’t necessarily match any marked crossings that might exist. I’ve not seen a good solution that addresses both groups of users, but I do know (because I regularly use OSM data for pedestrian routing) that mapping sidewalks as separate ways, if done badly, can break pedestrian routing for everyone.

Hehe - finally a Mapbox diary entry where the animated gifs actually make sense!

In most cases animated gifs just make the entry unreadable (or, as happened recently, crash the browser), but here it’s at least relevant :)

@flohoff - would a changing travel time still help to indicate that there’s a problem? As I read it from https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osrm-talk/2015-July/000866.html it sounds like the alternative routes all have the same length.

It’s a great idea, but I suspect that the biggest challenge would be a technical one - having the infrastructure available to display “tiles from cold” in a new style for the whole world. Maybe something that’d be esier to set up would be something on a local or regional basis?

For my own use I often use a different rendering to OSM’s standard one, and regularly see things that I’ve missed* by using it (as you would with any different rendering).

• Most often public footpath definitions (an England-and-Wales “access” thing), and named landuse and area definitions that the standard map doesn’t include yet.

For the benefit of anyone not subscribed to talk-us, there’s a discussion thread there:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2015-September/thread.html#15261

and there is also lots of discussion on this related changeset:

changeset/33669446

Seriously, instead of “cursing contributors who neglect correct capitalization” talk to them about it - explain what the problem is politely, and offer to help them fix it. We’re likely talking about new and inexperienced mappers here - they need help not silent abuse :)

As the proverb goes “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”.

How often do admins (who are the people who remove diary spam) regularly check osm.wiki/Spam ? I ask because I’ve just noticed that that page has a “Notes with spam content” section. I’m a moderator (DWG member) and am one of the people who can hide problematical notes. I never knew that this page contained that section (it was added in September 2013!) and have been blissfully unaware of any entries that it might have contained.

This problem will go away once the GSoC-supported reporting system is ready, but for now please don’t assume that by updating a wiki page that communication has occurred; if you want to make sure that e.g. an offensive note gets removed quickly mention it on IRC or email [email protected] . Personally I’ve always reported diary spam directly to the admins in #osm-dev

Maybe I’m doing something wrong here, but using the GSOC branch of OSM-carto to render a few tiles locally I’m not seeing the difference between motorways and other roads that I’d expect at zoom 7:

That corresponds to http://tile.openstreetmap.org/7/63/41.png:

Personally, I’d expect to see the M6, M1, M18 and M60 much clearer than the other roads at that zoom, as is possible now. This isn’t a problem from z9 on (the “motorway” red there stands out much better, as seen in your examples above).

I’m really not convinced that comparing with Google Maps is helpful. Google’s web maps mostly show only roads, since that’s all the information that Google has (compare for example http://imgur.com/miP025m with https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.2937291,-1.5174463,15z ).

In Google’s world bright orange makes sense, since thery’re showing relatively few classes of features, and a largely four-colour map makes sense. A cynic might suggest that Google’s target market is largely Americans who never walk or cycle anywhere; though they’re happy tell tell European public transport users which bus to get, just not where it goes.

However, OSM’s world is not Google’s world. That doesn’t mean that OSM’s standard style is perfect - far from it. Green trunks the same colour as woodland really don’t work at all. On an OSM map there are many, many different classes of feature and so moving roads towards one colour space does have advantages, but the bright orange struggles (in your initial London example) because there’s too much of it.

However the bigger problem is that the OSM Standard Style tries to be both “a nice map” and “part of the mapper feedback loop” - given the level of detail that’s being mapped in some places now I don’t see how it can do both. From reading (1) I guess that you’re limited by what would work technically as a style on osm.org now (i.e. no use of hstore and no use of lua to make the SQL sane). Would transparent overlays be in or out on that basis? You can go “too far” with them (the UK Met Office’s forecast maps show what goes wrong when you do) but perhaps a “political” background and a “natural” background overlaid with features for different consumers might work.

(1) osm.wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2015/AcceptedProjects/Road_style_in_Default_OSM_map_style#Objectives

(2) e.g. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/map/gcx4zrw25#?zoom=9&map=Rainfall&lon=-1.08&lat=53.96&fcTime=1437782400