Crosswalks should have similar form treatment as bridges and tunnels

[nateirwin]

Crosswalks are everywhere, and it is important that we capture them in our data, as we need this information to add accessibility information to Places Mobile apps. Currently you have to manually add a tag to designate a section of a sidewalk or trail as a crosswalk. I think we need to make this more intuitive in Places Editor.

It is easy to designate a section as a bridge or a tunnel:

We should also make it similarly easy to designate a crosswalk.

[chadlawlis]

The best practice is a little confusing/complex according to the wikis:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:crossing

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:footway%3Dcrossing (see Examples section, image below)

Discussed this with @jimmyrocks and he is going to ask the community before we move forward.

[chadlawlis]

Okay, see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/newbies/2010-April/005268.html

Best practice appears to be adding a node to the associated way in the middle of the crosswalk tagged highway=crossing along with access (foot, bicycle, horse, etc).

[nateirwin]

Guess I disagree with this.

One of our primary use cases is using geolocation to let a visually-impaired user know when they are entering a crosswalk and then leaving it again. I feel like we won't be able to get the granularity we need with a point feature. A crosswalk seems like a linear feature to me.

[chadlawlis]

Ya, I agree. Another approach is to tag the crosswalk using a node in the middle and connect to it from the sidewalk using footway=crosswalk.

I'll let @jimmyrocks chime in here on the results from his crowdsourcing efforts :smile:

[jimmyrocks]

I'm researching just using crossing=yes, seems easy from our point of view, and like it won't break anything in OSM.

On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Chad Lawlis notifications@github.com wrote:

Ya, I agree. Another approach is to tag the crosswalk using a node in the middle and connect to it from the sidewalk using footway=crosswalk.

I'll let @jimmyrocks https://github.com/jimmyrocks chime in here on the results from his crowdsourcing efforts [image: :smile:]

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/nationalparkservice/places-editor/issues/67#issuecomment-114633249 .

[nateirwin]

+1

Seems like it is easy to implement and we can always adjust in the future, if needed.

[jimmyrocks]

Looks like we're good to go with this idea

I would expect any of these should be understood as a crosswalk by data consumers: highway=footway, footway = crossing highway=cycleway, cycleway = crossing highway=path, path = crossing

How about we get rid of "ford", "cutting", and "embankment" from "structure".. and maybe change it from "structure" to some other name?

Ambitious

[nateirwin]

I would say let's just add it to the structure section for now. And we can just leave the others.

Low-hanging fruit ;-)

[chadlawlis]

+1

Are we sticking with crossing=yes or are we supporting all of these?

I would expect any of these should be understood as a crosswalk by data consumers: highway=footway, footway = crossing highway=cycleway, cycleway = crossing highway=path, path = crossing

[jimmyrocks]

Let's just do crossing=yes

[chadlawlis]

Updated in the guide: https://github.com/nationalparkservice/places-tracing-guide/commit/f42be8d0f93bb57a26223eddc514e149545b1f07

[jimmyrocks]

Added to iD, I even gave it a slightly different style in iD