To the best of my knowledge, all concrete sidewalks in Toronto are built by building falsework forms and pouring concrete into them.
The tag surface=concrete:plates is intended, per wiki, for “heavy-duty” concrete plates. These plates are typically made off-site and transported to where they’re needed. As shown in the wiki picture, they’re often connected to each other with buckles. This is not the case in Toronto. (Let’s say it’s not the case for vast majority of Toronto sidewalks, because I’m betting someone will find the one edge case that possibly exists.)
Around 2022-2023, a couple hundred of surface=concrete:plates tags were added to Toronto sidewalks, mostly by StreetComplete users. These tags are incorrect (see discussion below).
I propose to delete vast majority of surface=concrete:plates tags from highway=footway ways within City of Toronto. I would do a cursory check on aerial imagery to check if the footway looks like a usual (“normal”) sidewalk or walkway.
Per Automated Edits code of conduct - OpenStreetMap Wiki, please discuss in this thread: comments, questions, objections, or support. I will create a wiki page as required by the guideline, and I will wait at least a week after last post in the thread before making the change.
Discussion:
I think it would be mostly accurate to replace occurences concrete:plates with surface=concrete, but it’s impossible to be sure without an onsite survey. The surface tag doesn’t really add much (we don’t have many unpaved sidewalks…), and can be re-surveyed with StreetComplete or another app if desired, so I propose to delete it without replacement in the mass edit.
Toronto’s poured sidewalks do have gaps across them that look a little bit like edges of pre-cast plates, but there’s following differences:
- the thicker gaps are compression gaps, with a thin piece of wood inside
- the thinner gaps are control / contraction joints
- the lengths of the sidewalk “plates” between gaps are not even - they’re basically a best-effort by construction crews to space them out relatively equally, especially where only a part of the sidewalk is replaced
- there is usually a stamp with the year the sidewalk was poured and the company that built it
- there are no buckles that would hold the plates together
- if you see a sidewalk being installed or replaced, you see it being poured in place
Here’s the chronology of concrete:plates in Canada per Taginfo:
In particular I note that after the rapid growth around 2023, it has levelled off, so hopefully editors are not still making this mistake en masse. I will also message any editors that seem to still be tagging like this if I see it.
One of the edits I saw introducing the concrete:plates tag was changeset 152456361 - I commented, unfortunately there was no response, but the user’s later edits (for example this one) do use surface=concrete so hopefully they’ve seen the difference.
I propose to remove the tag from highway=footway ways rather than limiting to footway=sidewalk ways as some uses of the tag were on strictly-not-sidewalk footways like this one.
It might be possible to expand this mass edit to all of GTA, to cover for cases like this one in Mississauga, but I am not as familiar with sidewalks outside Toronto proper so I would discuss this separately later on.
Here’s what the StreetComplete quest for surfaces looks like (screenshot of version as of October 1, 2024). It’s disabled by default, at least in Ontario:
The illustration looks pretty good to me - it shows the buckle - I don’t know how StreetComplete could be improved here, short of not offering concrete:plates as an option on footways in Canada or Ontario at all.
And finally, some photos of poured concrete sidewalks/footways in Toronto:
Recently I found an actual use of concrete plates in Toronto… Nathan Phillips Square is made up of concrete panels - you can see how they’re installed when they do maintenance on them. It’s currently tagged as surface=paving_stones which doesn’t seem wrong to me either (paving_stones isn’t limited to being actual stone) and I don’t intend to change it.
