Friday 27 February 2009

Numbers and footpaths.

The decorating at home is just about done, but not leaving enough time for a proper foray into the local area mapping. Instead I thought I'd try another way of adding addresses. I printed a map with a couple of streets on it and set off to check out the numbers on the doors, writing on the map. I found this a bit less intrusive than taking photos, but still slow and meticulous.

I took my GPS and I'm pleased I did. I wasn't sure that it was needed but the track returned improved the position of the roads somewhat. It has also led me to wonder about footpaths, or what are known, I think, as sidewalks in the USA. Some roads have footpaths beside them on one or both sides. We currently map the road, but generally not the footpath. The tracks I have show very clearly that I was on the path, not the road and I could comfortably add the footpath (or sidewalk or footway or, very confusingly for some, the pavement). At what point should I add any of these? What would I tag them as; highway=footway looks much too bold on the standard renders? I could use one of Cloudmade's custom renders, but the standard Mapnik would still look very odd. Also, does a little local sidewalk add enough value? I might invent highway=sidewalk and use my own renderer (when it's working) to see what it could look like.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This was discussed somewhere else recently, the general thought seemed to be that the footpaths only need adding if they actually add something. That is, if they are far enough apart from the road that routing would be affected then add them.

Cycle lanes I would argue a little differently, in that roads with cycle lanes in one or both directions render quite nicely on the open cycle map.