alt Hacker NewsIn a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
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Gigachad • today at 2:32 AM
I highly suspect Apple and Google maps are auto tracing satellite images. Apple maps has perfect coverage of every road marking on their maps that exactly lines up to the satellite images.
I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.