Understanding the wiki page on sidewalk

General talk
158

Made me curious!

  1. how that breaks down, and
  2. how much stems from misuse of “this is a sidewalk” when it’s just a regular pedestrian path

…since I see barely any near me and it also seems very confusing to try to squeeze in those two metre-precise extra ways between the buildings, roads, possibly parking spots and tramways, etc. Much easier to go on StreetComplete and tag what the layout and features of this way are, so I was curious if this is a lot of misuse and one super active region or so

TL;DR:

  1. Basically north america (CA,US,MX,CU,…) has 55% of the world’s distance in separately mapped sidewalks, with the other regions being basically a map of how well OSM is mapped (e.g. Europe is next with 22%). (There is also 4% unaccounted for, that must be on islands that I didn’t include in any continent’s bbox.)
  2. No, some countries genuinely have a lot of separately mapped sidewalks

Separately mapped ways seem to shoot up when countries are sparsely populated. From spot checking, I could not find a single questionable use in Iceland, one out of a dozen spot checks in Norway, and within maybe five checks in the USA I found one park that had a section marked as “sidewalk” (without being near any non-footway). The USA and unmentioned regions might warrant further inspection but it’s not super widespread at least: the vast majority that I saw was correctly mapped and followed some road – even if that is a motorway/expressway (saw that one in Oslo iirc).

Data dump regarding question#1

PS. I’ve moved your popularity mention on the wiki down to the section titled popularity, with a sentence in the original spot linking to that section. Hope that’s okay! Feel free to rework the popularity section, including what I wrote. I think it could use some cleaning up but I’m not sure what to best remove, e.g. should the discussion about raw usage counts be removed now that we have distances? Things like that