What does severity mean for crosswalk? Similarly for pedestrian signal.

[jonfroehlich]

How am I supposed to rate the passibility/severity of a crosswalk. Is it based on the surface condition?

[jonfroehlich]

Talked to Sierra about this today during our NSF meeting. They suggested that severity ratings don't make sense for pedestrian signal. Instead, they suggested that the most important thing is being able to assess whether the button is APS.

Also, Sierra noted that they cannot look up (due to our FOV constraints that we made with vertical panning in GSV) to see whether a pedestrian signal has a speaker.

[misaugstad]

Agreed that the severity rating doesn't make much sense for pedestrian signals, especially when you often can't discern a lot of info about the signal from GSV alone.

IMO, both the severity rating and the tags for crosswalks all fall under other label types already. Things that work as tags and impact severity:

• fading paint (the only thing not really covered by other label types)
• surface condition (covered by surface problem label type)
• median that gets in the way (would be covered by a missing curb ramp label)

As such, I'm not sure how to rate the severity either. Do we forego surface problem and obstacle labels and just use crosswalk tags and severity instead?

If I have time today, I might play around with excluding the severity rating section for the pedestrian signal label type to see what that looks like. If it is incredibly simple to update the UI to accommodate that, I can remove severity for pedestrian signals today.

[jonfroehlich]

Right. Very good points. I totally realize (and have previously reflected on) how some tags intersect with other label types. Still, I think it's convenient and useful to have redundant tags for crosswalks like:

"broken surface" or "cracks" "cosmetic damage" "uneven surface"

See: https://github.com/ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage/issues/2766#issuecomment-1048100039

Users can also add in surface problem labels if they want.

[misaugstad]

@jonfroehlich how bad does this look?

[jonfroehlich]

Looks great!

[jonfroehlich]

I also wonder about the severity rating for "no sidewalk." How do you usually approach this @misaugstad?

[misaugstad]

@jonfroehlich I typically mark it a "3" if there is a sidewalk on the other side of the street, and a "5" if there is no sidewalk on either side. Though sometimes I'll mark it as a "1" if there is a sidewalk on the opposite side, and it doesn't seem important for there to be a sidewalk on the side that is missing sidewalk.

[jonfroehlich]

Gotcha. So you think the severity rating for "no sidewalk" is worthwhile to keep? I guess I drop so many of them that I don't always label the severity.

[misaugstad]

Right, I forgot to answer the important part of the question! I don't think that severity for missing sidewalk is particularly important, no. And removing it would simplify the tool, which seems worthwhile.

[jonfroehlich]

I sort of lean that way myself... I do think sometimes it's nice to indicate severity (e.g., when a sidewalk abruptly ends) but on the other hand, we now have better tags for that so severity could be derived?