Loomio
Fri 24 May 2024 10:57AM

How best to prevent route planners recommending legal, but dangerous, routes to pedestrians?

I Ian Public Seen by 35

Hello - I'm new to this forum, so please accept my apologies if the answer to this should be obvious.

Near to where I live there are several roads where it is legal to walk, but which are extremely dangerous for pedestrians. Various route planners (Komoot, the OS app, Strava, etc) recommend these roads when creating walking or running routes. Is there a way to flag these on OSM as somehow "not recommended" for pedestrians, so that they are less likely to be recommended by these route planners?

RW

Robert Whittaker Sat 25 May 2024 7:00AM

Hi Ian,

Different people will have different ideas of what makes a route 'dangerous' or undesirable. Rather than trying to include some subjective measure of how suitable a route is, it's better to try to capture the objective properties that contribute to suitability, so that people and routing software can make their own judgements.

If pedestrians are legally banned from using the road then you can use foot=no to prevent routers from using it. Otherwise, the most useful things to tag would probably be the road classification (highway=*), vehicle speed limit (maxspeed=*) and whether there is a pavement (sidewalk=*). It would also help if you made sure preferable alternative routes for pedestrians were properly mapped and tagged (e.g. connected ways with highway=*, foot=*, surface=* etc.).

You can learn more about the different tags in the wiki at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/

PS: This forum isn't that active any more. You might get more responses by using the UK section of the OSM Community forum at https://community.openstreetmap.org/c/communities/uk/86