How do I map sidewalk gaps that are curbed to allow drainage from a slope?

Help and support
1

common in Southern California are sidewalks that appear to be wheelchair accessible but suddenly and without warning the sidewalk suddenly drops to street-level with a gap of about 1.5 meters. The gap has curbs on both sides of the space. I can provide photos if someone will tell me how. This is a known serious hazard and is a fallrisk.

2

I’m from So Cal (although I’ve lived in the Bay Area for almost 30 years). I don’t recall seeing this type of sidewalk construction. What city?

3

Although we can’t use it for mapping, for illustration purposes, the easiest way is to just provide a link to a Google Streetview image showing it.

4

Here are two G Streetmap images: Google Maps

5

As a first attempt, I would map this as a barrier=kerb, kerb=raised as two nearby nodes in the locations where the curb interrupts the sidewalk

8 Likes
6

Thanks.

I’d also break the footpath, then add the kerbs as Jarek said. Wouldn’t hurt to also map a drain coming from up the hill out to the road!

& what are the brick “steps”? Is that used as an access path to somewhere?

7

You can embed images in this forum’s posts. I use it on my phone, it is the a button in the bottom right corner below the text box. It might look different on a bigger screen.

8

The sidewalk ways should have the standard highway=footway + footway=sidewalk tags.

The curb nodes should have the standard barrier=kerb + kerb=raised + tactile_paving=no tags - this is the most important part.

The in-between segment way (if you even go to the level of detail of splitting it out) should be a highway=footway of some kind (not footway=crossing) - though whether “unrefined”, as footway=sidewalk, as footway=link, as footway=path…? I’m not sure.

Annotated screenshot of Google Maps Street View image at previously-provided example location, with lines added to represent ways and circles added to represent nodes, with tagging suggestions included.
Annotated screenshot of Google Maps Street View image at previously-provided example location, with lines added to represent ways and circles added to represent nodes, with tagging suggestions included.2560Ă—1315 1 MB

9

I see you’ve hedged about whether to even split out a separate way, and I’d tend to agree. From the perspective of a pedestrian, this isn’t so different than a gap in the sidewalk that the road crew dug up and forgot to put back together. (It happens.) If we do split it out as a separate way, I agree that footway=crossing would be misleading, since there’s no crossing traffic to watch for. Those bricks do resemble steps leading down to the street, but that alone doesn’t make a crossing. More importantly, the starting assumption is that this gap exists for drainage purposes. Map the drain, and then I guess this would be a case for ford=yes, though renderers will be prone to overstating the ford’s prominence.

2 Likes
10

Thank you everyone for the advice. When my changes / edits appear on the live OSM I will try to post a link here and request comments.

11

The changes are “live” when you submit them. (Sometimes rendering them in some layers takes longer.)

Thwy are here: Changesets by dwl-sdca | OpenStreetMap

In this change you seem to have created a new short sidewalk overlapping but not connected to the other sidewalk, which is unlikely to be correct.

12

Thank you for the new sidewalk comment. I think that I now have it so that the sidewalk renders correctly.

1 Like