Deth

Fitness and everything else

Adding Sidewalks And Crossings To Open Street Map Will Be My Next Project

I like to do my best to try to keep open street map updated in the areas that I know. Up until now that’s been mostly keeping businesses up to date as new ones open or old ones close. I’ve also added/ tweaked some hiking trails that we’ve been on.

With us doing so much walking over the past year or so I have been thinking about doing (at least the parts of Mount Joy that I am familiar with’s sidewalks and street crossings.)

I know that it’s going to take time but it’s something I want to work on over the next few weeks or months. I am in the practice phases now figuring out the most efficient ways to do it. I’m doing it mainly for accessibility for those in a wheel chair or of course visually impaired like myself. I don’t know whether there’s anyone around here that would find it useful but if it helps just one person it will be more than worth my time and effort.

I’m going to take my time and pick away at it since it’s going to be tedious and monotonous. The other thing that’s going to make this time consuming for me to do is there are so many sections that have partial sidewalks. I’m still in the playing around and not saving phase for now but I look forward to getting started for real once I am confident enough that I won’t make any big mistakes. I enjoy working on trying to help out with the whole open street map thing and think this will be a great project.

Like many things on OSM there are multiple ways to tag things and this case doesn’t seem to be one where there’s a clear cut preference. I am leaning towards tagging the roads with the sidewalk: tags though at least around here where the sidewalks tend to run along side of the road with only a curb or very narrow strip of grass between the roadway and walk way. That just seems to be the way to do it with much less cluttering of ways.