Poll - should StreetComplete disable the “Are pedestrians forbidden to walk on this road without sidewalk here?” quest in the UK

rskedgell · 2024-09-05T17:45:33.344Z

The StreetComplete quest “Are pedestrians forbidden to walk on this road without sidewalk here?” is a very poor fit for the UK, because the correct answer in almost every case is “no”.

Apart from motorways, a pedestrian prohibition must be explicitly signed with TSRGD diagram 625.1, however users who have this task involved either:

Misinterpret the task as if it asked “do you have a vague and woolly feeling that maybe pedestrians ought not to walk here”, incorrectly answer “yes”, resulting in an incorrect foot=no tag being added
Understand the question and correctly answer “no”, resulting in a redundant (and possibly unhelpful to routers) foot=yes tag being added.

Some users have added foot=no to dual carriageway trunk roads, some of which might be correct, but they’re hard to verify without going through a lot of Bing and Mapillary street side imagery, checking The Gazette, etc. I am not convinced that StreetComplete is the best tool to map restrictions on 70 mph roads.

In StreetComplete #4998, @westnordost suggested that he would disable the quest in the UK if he saw evidence of community consensus. I had suggested changing the wording to ask users if there was a signed prohibition, but this would have been incorrect for people using British English outside the UK.

Should this quest be disabled in the UK

Yes
No

0 voters

InsertUser · 2024-09-05T18:14:02.647Z

Can it just default to off within the UK rather than be completely disabled? There may be a few people who want to do this one.

I have done some high speed mapping in StreetComplete, from the passenger seat of course.

Matija_Nalis · 2024-09-05T18:39:01.324Z

InsertUser:

Can it just default to off within the UK rather than be completely disabled?

No¹. StreetComplete can either:

disable the quest by default for everybody in every country (with a warning when attempting to enable it explaining why it is disabled by default), or
completely disable quest in some countries (without the possibility of enabling it back), or
both

¹ there is however issue #619 in SCEE (StreetComplete “Expert Edition” fork) to allow overriding such pre-quest country bans, if user enabled Expert Mode, and after a stern warning about attracting community wrath if misused is acknowledged)

rskedgell · 2024-09-05T18:53:58.448Z

If the quest were being used to describe the legal situation for foot=no, I would expect to see it only on the sliproads and roundabout exits where the prohibition sign is present. The sign is not repeated along sections of dual carriageway in the same what that some speed limits are and there is no end of restriction sign, so I have doubts about verifiability.

Fizzie41 · 2024-09-05T22:13:16.734Z

Saw a Note yesterday in Australia regarding this same matter, where pedestrians are also allowed to walk on the road, but SC apparently asked if they could?

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-09-05T23:55:32.027Z

rskedgell:

Understand the question and correctly answer “no”, resulting in a redundant (and possibly unhelpful to routers) foot=yes tag being added.

Redundant access tags (matching the defaults) are neither here nor there for major routers, such as GraphHopper, OSRM, and Valhalla. For practical reasons, pedestrian routing profiles don’t assume foot=unknown or foot=no, even in places like the U.S. that generally prohibit pedestrians on the roadway, because the assumption is that the pedestrian would at least try to follow the roadway somehow via a pavement, shoulder, or verge.

On the other hand, if there is a vague and woolly feeling about inaccessibility, that’s context that the router would lack but the end user would understandably want. However, we don’t have a data-side answer for that wherever access tags are strictly about legal restrictions.

SomeoneElse · 2024-09-06T00:19:25.606Z

Minh_Nguyen:

Redundant access tags (matching the defaults) are neither here nor there for major routers, such as GraphHopper, OSRM, and Valhalla. For practical reasons, pedestrian routing profiles don’t assume foot=unknown or foot=no, even in places like the U.S. that generally prohibit pedestrians on the roadway, because the assumption is that the pedestrian would at least try to follow the roadway somehow via a pavement, shoulder, or verge.

For commercial routers I’m sure that’s the case, but the OSRM implementation available from osm.org doesn’t do that.

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-09-06T00:49:26.280Z

SomeoneElse:

For commercial routers I’m sure that’s the case, but the OSRM implementation available from osm.org doesn’t do that.

Presumably you’re referring to the FOSSGIS OSRM instance’s refusal to route over the A166 approach to Stamford Bridge. OSRM’s default foot profile avoids highway=trunk by default, and the FOSSGIS foot profile does likewise:

Issues with foot.lua profile Help and support

Friendly tip: please don’t use pejorative words like “garbage” when reporting an issue to open-source maintainers. As you’ve noticed, OSRM’s default foot profile avoids trunk roads. This is because, in large parts of the world, highway=trunk is used to mean a road on which people aren’t permitted to walk. If you’re setting up your own instance of OSRM, and you just want to run it for NZ, this is pretty easy to fix. Simply edit foot.lua and add trunk (and trunk_link) to the list of permissible …

My main point is that an access tag matching the default – foot=no in this case – wouldn’t affect router behavior at all. The main consequence is a lack of clarity to other mappers about the intention of that redundant tag.

OSRM avoids the A166 because it’s tagged as highway=trunk and this profile omits trunk roads. I’m pretty sure the omission of trunk from the profile was an oversight during an old refactoring. It happens to work just fine in countries like Germany (?) where highway=trunk is likely to be a high-speed road unsuitable for pedestrians, as well as countries like the US where trunk roads going through urban centres are likely to have separately mapped footway=sidewalk ways, but clearly it doesn’t work for the UK’s urban centres.

For other surface streets, the foot profiles assume access=yes by default.

riiga · 2024-09-07T16:25:09.746Z

Thanks for raising this issue again!

This should also be disabled in Sweden (and Norway and Finland too probably) for the same reasons as above.

TrekClimbing · 2024-09-07T22:37:00.624Z

It might be worth mentioning that @westnordost said that if:

pedestrians can legally walk on roads such as a “short piece of road-way drawn on the asphalted area in the middle of large intersections for connectivity in OSM, turn lanes and bus lanes drawn as separate ways in OSM” without a prohibition sign , and
there was UK community consensus that such roads should not be tagged foot=no,

he would disable the quest in the UK as it would be too spammy to meet the quest guidelines.

I think this consensus was largely reached in the Talk-GB mailing list thread in March.

rskedgell · 2024-09-10T07:53:45.574Z

TrekClimbing:

I think this consensus was largely reached in the Talk-GB mailing list thread in March.

That conversation was referred to in StreetComplete issue #4998 discussion on 2024-03-08.

rskedgell · 2024-09-10T12:06:53.132Z

StreetComplete has now been updated by @westnordost to disable this quest in the UK. Thanks!

osmuser63783 · 2024-09-10T16:59:34.610Z

While we are on the subject of pointless quests, are there signal-controlled pedestrian crossings in the UK that don’t have a button to request a green man?

Because StreetComplete keeps asking me that and I’ve never encountered one where the answer was no.

rskedgell · 2024-09-10T17:21:17.281Z

Yes. They’re not very common and where I have encountered them in TfL-land they are always at traffic light controlled intersections. They may have a lowered kerb, tactile paving, dot markings across the street, but no button and sometimes no green man.

The junction of Fairfield Street with Bow Road is the nearest example to me which comes to mind.

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TrekClimbing · 2024-09-10T19:30:29.160Z

It was, but his statement was after quite a bit of back and forth following that mention, and it wasn’t clear that a consensus had emerged in that thread. I thought it was worth mentioning again. And also he was asking a slightly different question, so I thought that was worth pointing out.

Anyway, thanks for bringing about the vote and change

rskedgell · 2024-09-18T10:30:59.750Z

StreetComplete v59.0 has now been released, with this quest now disabled in the UK.

I will start to review the foot=no tags added using SC over the next few months. I anticipate that most can simply be removed, although where reasonable doubt exists I’ll leave them in place and add fixme tags and/or notes.