Interesting analysis, thanks for sharing. I wonder if another reason for low mapping levels is that mappers think there are “obvious” defaults, e.g. tagging a residential street with both sidewalks feels redundant if 95% of residential streets in a city have two sidewalks, and tagging that a rural road has no sidewalks feels equally redundant in areas where nobody would expect them to have one.

I don’t know if you are aware of OpenStreetBrowser.org, it shows a lot of detail about sidewalks in the Transportation -> Walking -> Footways layer.

Hi Chris

Thanks for the comments.

I have had some interaction with the StreetComplete account on Mastodon on this topic. In fact that’s who suggested loading the GeoJSON into SCEE - I was only familiar with vanilla SC and didn’t know that was possible until that conversation.

In generaI I’m not sure if this approach is really scalable. One thing I mentioned in the repository documentation, but not here, is that my initial experiments with generic global elevation models weren’t very successful at discriminating elevation changes over short distances. It was only when I switched to the high resolution Spanish national data that I started getting interesting results. I’m not sure how that would translate to a global application.

Alan

In fairness to mappers, it’s not always easy to derive a name from what is signed in the real world.

Many waymarked routes near me don’t have nice well-defined names like “King Charles II England Coast Path”. I have a photo of an information board labelled “GR249.4 Variante Villanueva del Rosario - El Chorro - Etapa 2: Antequera - Valle de Abdalajís”. The guideposts along that route route are labelled “GR249” (not GR249.4 like info board) and sometimes “Gran Senda de Málaga” (mentioned only in the small print in the info board). Disentangling a ref and a name that is not a description from all that is not trivial!

Indeed, I understand the aim of the ATP work and that it is not intended to replace manual mapping. I just thought it interesting that in an almost-central zone of European city, even if we had perfect information about all brands, it would only cover a small fraction of POIs.

Yes the location within malls does seem to be a problem. Probably not helped by the fact that (near me at least) there is no consistent addressing system for malls (even the name of the mall is often missing from published addresses, so there is just the name of a long avenue with no number).