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Where the Digital Sidewalk Ends
- CalRobert 2y agoI hope to use street view and Mapillary data to see if I can improve this myself, actually, but street view is too expensive and Mapillary too sparse
- 43920 2y agoIf you’re editing Openstreetmap, using data from Street View is prohibited by the license, even if you pay for it I believe. However, Microsoft has licensed Bing Streetside for this use for free; the dataset isn’t as good as Street View, but is much better than Mapillary.
- CalRobert 2y agoThanks for that (I haven't tried streetside) - I'm not editing openstreetmap at this point but trying to find homes near decent infra.
- moegev 2y agoHi CalRobert, Your use case is indeed one we are very keen to work on. What tools have you been using to find homes near decent infra? I don't find https://www.walkscore.com/ https://www.walkscore.com/ to of much use -- but maybe I don't understand how to use it.
- CalRobert 2y agoHi! I sent you a message on your site’s contact form
- throwway120385 2y agoI think this is why Google preferentially wanted to take me down a 45 MPH state route that runs downhill and has curves and no separation between the bike lane and vehicle traffic instead of the nice, calm, traffic-less series of roads in residential neighborhoods that was accessible with a quarter-mile detour. Those roads didn't have sidewalks or bike lanes marked on the roads, so they were totally unsafe for a cyclist. As opposed to the 45 MPH road, which is perfectly safe because it has a bike lane. This is a great project.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoIn my city the bike lanes are almost all death traps because they only exist to rake in federal funding with no care for making them useful or safe. I avoid them whenever possible. They routed one "lane" onto a narrow sidewalk under a wide railroad bridge and had to change a city ordinance prohibiting bikes on sidewalks in that region of the city.
- romwell 2y agoDo you, too, live in San Jose? My favorite feature of bike lanes there is how highway access ramps straight up cross them - - creating a flow of cars accelerating to highway speeds coming from behind and sideways from you, while you are in the perfect spot to be obscured by the car's A-frame. Or perhaps how I had to move away a sign saying "SHARE THE ROAD" (with bicycles, presumably) from the bicycle path. Multiple times. No, perhaps my favorite is how the Mayor decided to show off our bicycling infrastructure by taking a bicycle ride the first day of the year, and. . . . . . was promptly hit by an SUV, which broke his bones[1]. If you don't live in San Jose, that's all you need to know about cycling in San Jose. [1] https://abc7news.com/san-jose-mayor-hit-by-car-bicyclist/5001727/ https://abc7news.com/san-jose-mayor-hit-by-car-bicyclist/500...
- aziaziazi 2y agoHere’s the Belgian version with a good part of the population commuting by bike and the politics by taxi: "Health minister and deputy prime minister open car doors into busy bicycle lane." https://www.politico.eu/article/belgian-ministers-send-cyclists-crashing/ https://www.politico.eu/article/belgian-ministers-send-cycli...
- fishywang 2y agoCompare to European cities San Jose definitely is bad on bike infrastructure. But if you compare to neighbor cities like Santa Clara (low bar, I know), it's pretty ok. Sam Liccardo at least actually cares about cycling around the city, and made bike infrastructure improvements, like 3rd around downtown (yes it took some time after the change to educate our bright drivers how to make right turns there correctly, but it mostly works now). And San Jose's Department of Transportation traffic signal unit at least has an email address I can use to tell them which traffic signal failed to detect bicycle and turn green, and they actually fix them.
- ck2 2y agoI do not understand the mentality of blogging sites that do this, why lose visitors over simple text display? "Your Browser Is No Longer Supported" "To view this website and enjoy a better online experience, update your browser for free."
- verandaguy 2y agoOut of curiosity, what browser are you using?
- edflsafoiewq 2y agoIt appears to be made with Wix.com website builder. https://support.wix.com/en/article/supported-browsers https://support.wix.com/en/article/supported-browsers
- moegev 2y agoYup, I used Wix. It's the best I can do with the resources we have.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoThis is one area where autonomous vehicle companies can and should be contributing more to the public sphere. Much of this data already exists at a very high quality within mapping datasets to adjust priors for unseen pedestrian risk. There simply aren't institutional mechanisms to make mapping data public though.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoAre there that many (or even any) autonomous vehicles designed to drive on bike paths and/or sidewalks exclusively ?
- smokel 2y agoThere is quite some research being done on autonomous wheelchairs.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoNo, but presumably there are huge datasets from Tesla, Waymo, et al. that are tracking the boundaries of the road, crosswalks, the existence, or lack, of sidewalks, pedestrian density, desire paths, and all sorts of things that aren't on the map. If they aren't actively being tracked, the raw data could be used as training data against areas with known non-car infrastructure to create a model that maps areas with no data.
- dylan604 2y agoWhy do you think a private company attempting to beat the competition would make any of their data publicly available for other companies to benefit?
- AlotOfReading 2y agoYou might well ask the same about code, ML models, or testing datasets, all of which have established concepts of open access. The Waymo open dataset in particular contains some of the data being discussed. Can you clarify the difference you think is significant here?
- jmward01 2y agoI think this is a trend for the future. Mico-knowledge (tm) like this will enable things we haven't thought of. Things like this 'fill in the gaps' that make it hard to create new services and take advantage of opportunities. I hope this continues to be followed up on.
- nurtbo 2y agoFor biking and walking, could accepting data from Strava users (or other places that let you download GPS tracks), let you infer where there are sidewalks and good bike routes? Eg if you have 20 GPS traces in an area and they all turn at one point, that’s a good place to turn. Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?
- WorldMaker 2y ago> Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there? There's still a quality difference between a well-worn path and sidewalk. It can be a great way to find places to build new sidewalks. (There's the classic story of the University that didn't pave sidewalks in its quad until well worn paths in the grass were visible, using essentially crowd judgement/"ant hill optimization".)
- hunter2_ 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
- dghlsakjg 2y agoThis is where Strava is interesting because of how fine grained the data is. You can reasonably assume that a place frequented by road bikers is an acceptable surface for electric scooters, or wheelchairs (the surface only, not necessarily an appropriate setting). A well worn path will show many walkers and runners, but almost no road bikers. I'm sure there's all sorts of accurate inferences that can be made from the data.
- moegev 2y agoMapbox presumably does this now. The issue with the real world is that you do need some high quality truth data to do any decent routing. Different users/vehicles are more or less sensitive to road conditions. If you want to provide an effective micro-mobility routing solution you have to know with certainty where the sidewalks and bike lanes are, how wide they are, how f'ed-up they are and provide directions accordingly. Waiting until 10,000 different transportation agencies decide to fix sidewalks and bike lanes on different schedules and different standards isn't gonna solve issues any time soon.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThe splash page showing a GIS image of San Francisco is always a sign that the lights are on and nobody is home. On one hand people feel compelled to put up images of San Francisco to make people think that they're with it. On the other hand if you've been to San Francisco you'll know it is where GIS applications go to die. It's where I'll walk past endless open restaurants because my coworker insists on finding one with Yelp and five of the restaurants listed on Yelp won't close. It's where the only place my handheld GPS can get a fix is on the roof of the Moscone Center. It's where my handheld GPS struggles to route, even for a car, because there is just too much geometry in too small of an area. Go to some normal city, say St. Louis, MO or Billings, MT and you will see GIS applications "just work" in comparison.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoI've done GNSS localization in SF and I can't relate to what you're saying here. It's not notably more challenging than any other dense urban environment and the public commercial maps (e.g. Google, Apple) have better data than they do in most cities. I saw more issues with Pittsburgh and Phoenix because they hit weird edge cases no one had foreseen than SF, which had the typical issues you expect to see in urban canyons. Plus, there are local GNSS companies testing in the bay area, so stuff tends to just work out of the box.
- moegev 2y agoWe chose SF Bay area because we live here. I just did some surveying in the greater Detroit metro so I hope to look at the data there too. However, mapping and surveying is a supremely local thing, so we started locally.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- moegev 2y agoI don't understand what you are saying. Are you saying GIS, GNSS and RTK are worthless in SF?
- ghostpepper 2y agoNot sure why you want a fake email / zip code in your database but okay
- hunter2_ 2y agoEven after reading the entire article, I don't understand. Mind clarifying?
- forbiddenlake 2y agoIf you click through to the app it requires an email and zip code to "register" and view the map. But it doesn't require actually receiving an email.
- wayeast 2y agoI suppose the tl;dr would go something like this: 1) we think mapping/navigation/routing should be as good for bicyclists, pedestrians, people in wheelchairs, on scooters, and micromobility generally as it is for those driving cars. 2) the reason mapping/navigation/routing is _not_ as good for micromobility as for cars is scarcity and incompleteness of map data necessary to enable it (we're using OSM to make this determination). 3) we're working on some tools to address the data problem, with an eye to building high-quality micromobility mapping/navigation/routing on top of it.
- hunter2_ 2y agoI was looking for an explanation of the comment above me, not of the article, but thanks anyway! Excellent work.
- ghostpepper 2y agoI wanted to see the map but I got hit with a registration form asking for my zip code, but I don't live in the US.
- askvictor 2y agoEspecially where it's a numeric field with a spinner widget letting you go to -1 with one click off the starting page. And assuming no-one outside the US would want to have a look at this.
- briandear 2y agoApple only uses OSM for areas for which they have limited data. Just an FYI. The article implies that all these different map apps are using the same underlying data when they aren’t.
- aidenn0 2y agoI don't know how solvable a problem this is. There are two roads that would be labeled nearly identically that are an option for my commute. Let's call them Road A and Road B. Road A: 45MPH, with a dedicated bike lane with no barrier. Road B: 40MPH with a dedicated bike lane with no barrier. The similarities end there though: Road A: Many turns with trees providing poor visibility Road B: Relatively straight, good visibility Road A: Typically has obstructions in the bike lane Road B: Typically no obstructions in the bike lane Road A: People speed rather massively Road B: Many traffic signals; people who speed tend to take parallel Road A instead to avoid the signals. Road A: The bike lane is sometimes only 30cm wide Road B: The bike lane is wide enough to ride 2 abreast, and there is usually an additional 30cm painted area between you and traffic. Road A: Car v. bike accidents are fairly regular, with multiple fatalities in the time I've lived here. Road B: Every car v. bike accident I'm aware of was at night and involved an intoxicated driver. I have 3 parallel options for going in this direction, in order of increasing total distance for traveled: Road A, Road B, and a MUP (i.e. combination bike/pedestrian path). For obvious reasons, I prefer Road B, but it's hard to label a map in such a way that it won't pick the two best choices as Road A (shortest) the MUP (avoid highways).
- egypturnash 2y agoI wonder if “ghost bikes” belong in a bike map. Someone died on a bike here. If you’re on a bike maybe be extra careful, maybe avoid this street next time.
- aidenn0 2y agoDeaths are the most clear-cut data, but close-calls will be more numerous and thus less noisy. Either way it would need to be adjusted for cyclist volume.
- m463 2y agosome cities/counties have (and publish) bike friendly commuting maps. Sort of like maps with the road B's highlighted. don't see why this data can't make it into maps, like A B C roads for cars.
- sahmeepee 2y agoI think the Street Complete approach is much more practical than anything voice based: slightly gamified "quest" based entry which lets you tackle an area or a data type in detail. It's pretty much impossible to do any meaningful and accurate data entry while riding a bike, whether the interface is touch, voice or whatever. You need to be able to verify that the phone has accurately captured what you were trying to tell it, not just take it on faith that it's worked, and that means looking at the screen carefully. Good luck to them making this work reliably.
- runsonrum 2y agoI know this article isnt about the book but I haven't thought about it in decades. Loved it as a child. I should have another look. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Sidewalk_Ends https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Sidewalk_Ends
- IshKebab 2y agoThis feels like more of an "America sucks for cycling" problem than a mapping problem. I have never experienced this issue using Google Maps for cycling in the UK because roads like that don't generally exist. (And in fairness they may use high quality mapping data from OS.)
- esperent 2y agoThe entire world sucks for cycling. A few urban areas, mostly in Europe, are an exception to this. I'm sure that the entire UK isn't good for cycling, are you talking about a relatively small area in a city?
- askvictor 2y agoThe prototype device they have near the end - looks like a raspberry pi + GPS receiver? The only possible reason I can think of for that is to get higher accuracy GPS than a smartphone, but is it that much more accurate? And is that accuracy that useful? I can think of a bunch of Bicycle User Groups here in Melbourne (AU) that would help contribute to initiatives like this (while AU is generally better than US for cycling, there's still a _long_ way to go), but I would think an app would make it much more scalable than hardware (also, are there not external GPS receivers available for phones)? My other thought is, once there's a decent set of data like this, how is it updated? While road alignments don't change that often (so car routes don't need to change often), the small-scale details like this change much more frequently
- steventhedev 2y agoWhy not bulk import this from your city/county/municipality GIS system? Dunno about San Francisco city, but many will track sidewalks as part of maintenance management. Depending on how well organized they are, they might have additional features such as trees and street lighting.
- cocoto 2y agoOf course data matters but the routing engine is also very important, with the calibration of the weights on the edges of the graph. For cycling it feels like Organic Maps is so much better than Google Maps and Apple Maps, consistently offering safer routes which are also faster in practice because you don’t have to slow down for dangers. Google Maps is notoriously bad in rural/mountain areas, except if you are looking for mountain bikes routes…
- Temporary_31337 2y agoFwiw Strava probably has the best data for this- you can tell how good a cycling path is from average cycling speed.