Announcement / request for comments: naming sidewalks in Toronto

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@Jarek

Sidewalks mapped as nameless ways make text or voice routing impossible.

Impossible is a very strong word. Lately, I’ve been tinkering with a solution based on an off-the-shelf map matching service that doesn’t require any special tagging in the general case. It’s pretty easy to supplement the anonymous maneuver instructions with street names, but this only highlights the extremely poor state of pedestrian guidance instructions in the mainstream routers. Even with street names, I’d get totally lost with these instructions, which are far too granular around intersections for most pedestrians and wheelchair users but not granular enough for blind people. I’ll leave the details for a separate thread to keep this one more focused.

@Jarek

I do not propose to retag footways with existing non-street names. I thought your concern was that a data consumer would not be able to tell if the tagged name is a name or a street name. What is an example of a concern with that, specifically?

If you’re open to another example from south of the border, the first one that comes to mind is the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. If we start indiscriminately tagging name=* on sidewalks, it’s only a matter of time before renderers add a blanket rule to suppress labels on sidewalks to reduce clutter and prioritize the street’s label, impacting more remarkable cases like the Walk of Fame. A data consumer could potentially rely on a heuristic to preserve the name if it differs from the street’s name. However, this can be fragile as some mappers tend toward descriptive naming.

@ChaireMobiliteKaligrafy

Automating this could work for most streets, but there are many complicated geometries where you need “human” intervention to figure out the correct name to put, and where to split on the corners. One example is in roundabouts, should we remove the names there or try to figure out to which street each segment is related to?

I also wonder what to do with sidewalk “stubs”. Very often one of these curb ramps or connections serves more than one street. These tiny segments won’t matter too much for a renderer, but a router would surface them. There also seems to be some hesitation within the community about consistently splitting them from the main ways.

How to tag "sidewalk stubs"?

Often, these little stubs represent curb ramps. How you map the stubs depends on how you map the adjoining ways, so the following examples are an attempt to demonstrate how the stubs fit into an intersection layout. The term “curb ramp” depends on an accessible ramp for wheelchairs and strollers (prams). As with footway=access_aisle, it’s pretty common to extend the stub a foot or two longer to meet the sidewalk way at the landing and tag it all as a sidewalk. Moreover, there are still many rai…