2025-11-14 –, Area
With two styles for mapping sidewalks, it's difficult to map footways and use the data. This talk dives into several new tools for assessing sidewalk coverage, creating personalized and more detailed walkability isochrones, figuring out where to prioritize a new crossing, and routing based on user-defined "interesting streets".
With two different styles for mapping sidewalks in OSM, often mixed in the same area, both mapping footways and using the data are tricky. This talk dives into several new tools for reconciling the two mapping styles and doing useful things with the data. We'll cover:
- assessing the coverage and quality of sidewalk data, according to criteria like the Pedestrian Working Group's tiers
- calculating walkability/isochrones, based on the actual difficulty of crossing a busy road
- pinpointing the worst severances stopping an area form being easily walkable
- prioritizing which severances to fix based on local priorities, such as safe routes to school or encouraging footfall past local shops
- generating routes that don't just optimize speed, safety, or traffic stress, but also a user-defined "attractiveness" score based on what shops, urban morphology, and types of buildings someone likes best
We'll briefly discuss how all of these tools run directly in your web browser, without a database or backend server, but you don't need any technical background to enjoy this part.
sidewalks, routing, tools
Affiliation:A/B Street Ltd
Dustin is a software engineer who builds open source tools using OpenStreetMap to improve walking, cycling, and public transit in cities. He runs A/B Street Ltd.