Seeking your input on a new PDX-OSM pedestrian improvements project

[Madeline Steele]

Hello everyone,

 I’m Madeline, a new GIS Data Analyst at TriMet, and I wanted to let you all know about a new collaborative project for improving the pedestrian network in OSM in the Portland Area. (For those of you in the PDX-OSGEO google group, sorry for the cross posting). The City of Portland, Oregon Walks, and TriMet have been adding sidewalk tags to street centerlines, and we’re really hoping to engage the broader OSM and PDX-OSGeo community with this effort as we move forward. We will be having a meeting at Metro soon (they’re supportive too), and if you’re interested in this work, it would be great it you could join us! I’ll be sending out a doodle poll soon to schedule this – please contact me if you’d like to be included. We also aim to have a mapathon or two on this project – more on that later.

 We don’t have anything published online yet as this is still getting off the ground, so I’ll include a brief outline of our methods and goals here to get the conversation going. We really want to get OSM community input on this soon, so please email me with any thoughts, comments, or concerns that you may have.

The basic approach:

• Add sidewalk tags to OSM centerlines (with values of both, no, left, or right)
• We are NOT adding new ways representing sidewalks to OSM. We’re just planning to add tags to street centerlines, as adding geometry would be a monumental task and it would be harder to maintain as well.
• We are splitting the centerlines where sidewalks are not consistent along its entire length.
• We are using imagery (Bing and Metro’s aerial imagery) as well as the City of Portland’s sidewalk asset file (this is a great reference, esp. where the tree canopy is thick). Metro is going to round up the most up-to-date sidewalk asset files for the broader region so we can use those once we’re done with Portland.
• We are doing this in JOSM, by hand (no shapefile imports!)

Major benefits of adding sidewalk presence/absence information to all of OSM in the greater Portland Area:

• More accuracy and detail in OSM sidewalk information, which we hope will benefit all users.
• Enhanced pedestrian routing in TriMet’s OpenTripPlanner (OTP)
• OTP code could be modified to allow users to choose between speed and accessibility when planning walking portions of trips
• Smarter pedestrian infrastructure equity analysis
• Analysis of pedestrian accessibility to particular points of interest, such as schools and bus stops
• Provides data foundation for a fine-grained pedestrian network model (using Scott Parker’s tools), which would allow us to prioritize improvements by identifying barriers and gaps where new infrastructure would provide greatest increases to flow

We’re also interested in potentially adding wheelchair tags and curb cut information to centerlines, but this presents more challenges, and standard tagging practices aren’t as established. If you’re interested in discussing how such accessibility information should (or shouldn’t) be represented in OSM, we would love to hear from you! I’d also love to talk to people about how we might engage volunteers via mapathons, map roulette, or other outlets.

Thanks so much, and hope to hear from you,

Madeline
madelin...@gmail.com / Ste...@trimet.org

 

 

 

 

[Jack Newlevant]

Yes, thanks, I’d like to be included!

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[Peter Dobratz]

I'd be interesting in helping with this.

When splitting Way objects in OSM, be sure to understand that the Way may be a part of a turn restriction Relation or a route Relation.  One or all of the newly created Ways will need to be included in the same Relation object, in a specific order and with specific roles.  It's great that you are using JOSM as this editor has the most complete support for Relations.

Thanks,

Peter

http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Peter%20Dobratz

Madeline
madelin...@gmail.com / Stee...@trimet.org

 

 

 

 

[Madeline Steele]

Excellent, thank you Peter. Your point about relations is well taken - we'll add something about that to our short methods doc. I've added both you and Jack Newlevant to the contacts list - expect a doodle poll tomorrow.

Best regards,

Madeline

Madeline
madelin...@gmail.com / Ste...@trimet.org

 

 

 

 

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