Usual shout-out for Peter Gould’s Mental Maps : a great book on mental geographies. Unfortunately it looks hugely expensive on the second-hand market.
In terms of viewpoint there’s a vast range from local inhabitants navigating to specific points to tourists who are interested in a relatively small number of features & routes between them. I’m struck by this 'cos in Edinburgh I avoid Princes St if I’m going from A-B and, for instance, will prefer to use Rose Street which just isn’t as busy (still true if I’m going to a shop on Princes St). I do something similar around Oxford Street in London, and used to have a large number of walking routes between Euston & Charing Cross & Victoria stations avoiding the main roads.
A lot of pedestrian navigation in cities is away from the centre and in these cases I want to know little short-cuts, paths taking me through green spaces as well as routes away from roads with heavy traffic. Mapping for OSM has led me to discover short cuts in areas I know well, and it makes them reasonably visible (particularly as the are used for routing). Even good topo maps are pretty poor at this, and they often don’t discriminate between private and public paths. To date OSM-based maps with a focus on walkers have tended to be oriented to hiking in rural & wilderness areas. There are some interesting ideas pointed to in this thread for consideration of what is needed in urban areas.
Thanks! Princes Street is not signposted as a core path so the only way it could be added would be from the official data.
I’ve done some digging and found that a map and dataset of all core paths in Scotland which would save us from having to contact each council individually. Sadly it is currently “available for Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) members and licenced partners only. This dataset is currently NOT available under an Open Government Licence (OGL).” The good news is, more data should be made available under the OGL soon. I’ll be keeping an eye on this, as it would pave the way for adding designation tags to OSM, cross-checking to see if any paths are missing in our map, etc. Maybe we could use some of the tools that have been developed for public rights of way in England and Wales.
For cities, maybe you could use external footfall data to create some
sort of equivalent classification?
It is already intrinsically contained in the grid data. One can assign
to each point in the network the maximum of the lower distance of start
to the point and point to the finish over all shortest routes passing
through that point. This treats detours that are superseded by shorter
ways in the neighbourhood like dead ends and highlights the footways
that are part of long distance routes.
I’ve given a talk
(alas in German, but some impressions on the slides
pages 9 to 13 may give the idea) on the FOSSGIS in Passau about that
approach. It works well for a city like Passau, marking a grid of links
through the city center that are indeed appealing. Beyond the talk
demonstration, this got no feedback, so got a priority too low to ever
implement it.
The issue is that any information with third-party copyright is excluded from the RPSI regs - which may be why it’s currently not available.
But it may well be worth submitting a RPSI request (you can try through Whatdotheyknow or email the appropriate FOI team) and seeing what they come back with. The ICO will deal with complaints if the response is not satisfactory (for example you think there are “unnecessary restrictions on re-use”).
Robert Whittaker (rjw62) is the master of using this legislation. Follow any of his requests on Whatdotheyknow? to see how it’s done: hint, requires dogged persistence, and a fine eye for detail.
Thanks both. For now I just sent an informal email. I got a reply very quickly saying they would publish more data under OGL soon. The chap even helpfully offered to let me know when that happens. I’ll look into other approaches if this doesn’t work out.
The core paths data for Scotland is now available under the Open Government Licence as GeoJSON and a shapefile.
What’s the best way to compare this with OSM data, to add the designation tag to the existing OSM paths? (I imagine most if not all already exist as paths in our data.)
Take OSM highway network (some core paths may be along tracks, service or unclassified roads, or worse, the Kintyre Way follows the B843 for quite some distance : it might not be busy but traffic is fast & there have been pedestrian fatalities). This may (just) be doable with Overpass (but not Overpass Turbo: A-roads are 30 Mbytes). Make sure the designation tag is available.
Read it into QGIS, and create a new layer transformed to the OSGB projection (27700).
Buffer the OSM highway network by some arbitrary value. (I’d use from 10 to 25 metres: it depends on how accurate you expect OSM to be).
Load the core paths file.
Step 1: find all core paths NOT within the buffered OSM highway layer
Step 2: find all within the buffered OSM highway layer
Filter the OSM highway layer by designation
Step 3: repeat step 1 with results of step 2 and the filtered OSM highway layer
Step 4: for completeness find all those core paths accurate tagged on OSM (basically repeat step 2
You end up with 3 useful layers: from steps 1, 3 and 4:
Core paths missing entirely
Core paths mapped, but missing designation
Core paths mapped with designation
The steps can be quasi-automated and saved as a workflow in QGIS which allows the process to be run with more up-to-date OSM data. Ensuring layers are spatially indexed makes a big difference in performance. In principle you can do this all in PostGIS too, but there are some gotchas which mean there are more steps involved.
7,500 elements not mapped on OSM (this probably includes paths mapped but greater than 20 m discrepancy in parts (e.g. Kintyre Way S of Ballygrogan on the Mull). Comparison based on old OSM data (so it picks up the non-path along Machrihanish Beach)
If I were to make a pedestrian centric map, I’d probably start with one of the existing cycling renders (CylOSM for example) and adapt it from there to render sidewalks and walking paths rather than bike lanes and bike paths (at high zoom levels) and walking routes (rather than bike routes) at low zoom levels
+1. It always bugged me how you only use ways to map a road, regardless of how wide/narrow it is. It’s not just a philosophical problem. When the number of lanes change, you follow the centre and introduce a curve that’s not there. This can possibly be confusing.
highway:pedestrian + area=yes still including JOSM
Tried area:highway=pedestrian before as I’ve been using that since long for vrs incl traffic islands, motorway toll areas a.o. but somehow it would not stick although there’s a wiki
And then countless not understanding that a way needs to be mapped across or else the navigator software falls flat. “can’t compute” or gives the zone a wide berth and a detour of a half mile stroll.
Just tested on something mapped in 2020 and switched the pedestrian area tagging from old style to new style, where the pedestrian streets were mapped to satisfy the routers. Can see the Largo Santa Maria pedestrian streets now.
The fact that (even) JOSM anno 2023 is still presenting old tagging in the standard preset is an indication, but anyway just cobbled another custom preset together for the new style.
I think you might want to use a few more words what you’re trying to say here. You’ve not linked what URL those graphs came from, and not said whether the thing that you’re trying to map is mostly a linear thing (as most streets are) or mostly not (e.g. a pedestrian square).
Personally, I wouldn’t OSM Carto as a reference renderer because of the well-documented issues with it not supporting “new” features. What to replace it with as a reference renderer is a good question, though…
As I understand it, this isn’t a “new” versus “old” thing. I use this rule of thumb:
highway=pedestrianarea=yes for the walkable part of a nonlinear plaza, where you would likely roam in any direction (maybe also highway=footway for the most important paths through the plaza, as a compatibility shim)
highway=pedestrian for a linear pedestrian mall, where you’re likely to go in a particular direction (maybe also area:highway=pedestrian for its 2D representation)
highway=footway for a linear footpath (maybe also with area:highway=footway for its 2D representation)
(Note that place=square technically includes the entire plaza, including unwalkable parts like a fountain or landscaping.)
osm-carto declined to render roads and paths in 2D many years ago, although this was before the project added support for man_made=bridge areas that are sort of analogous.
This topic started out asking about a pedestrian-centric map, which is a good way to frame the issue. As a general-purpose style, osm-carto isn’t anything-centric, but a separate style geared towards the urban walking environment would complement the featured cycling- and transit-oriented layers nicely.
Sorry for a late comment but I just saw this discussion. The University of Washington Taskar Center on Accessible Technology has a demo pedestrian map at accessmap.io. Besides showing sidewalks, it also shows the incline of the sidewalk. For those that are not familiar with Seattle, the downtown is very hilly.
It works well for a city like Passau, marking a grid of links
through the city center that are indeed appealing. Beyond the talk
demonstration, this got no feedback, so got a priority too low to ever
implement it.
In theory I think you should be able to reconstruct this from a Contraction Hierarchies graph. I’ve done some experiments with OSRM’s .level file but haven’t yet got a result with which I’m 100% happy.
