Anyone know whether there's a map about the smoothness of pavements?

Communities United Kingdom
1

I am trying to implement OSM into my webapp that i have to produce for my project and cannot find any maps about the smoothness of pavements across london. my guess is that such map does not exist and i will have to map it all myself. is there a quicker way to map roads and pavements, is there an existing map out there that i have not found or do i just have to sit there and meticulously map it all myself?

Cheers.

2

I don’t think anyone is tagging the smoothness of pavements. The smoothness tag is regarded somewhat sceptically by the UK community. I’m also not sure that much data has been added on pavements generally in London as they can generally be regarded as ubiquitous, but most people will use the sidewalk tags rather than mapping them explicitly.

If you wish to map this, I’d suggest just mapping non-smooth pavements. It’s reasonably to assume that most pavements are not too bad. Probably a bigger issue is narrow pavements which may be more susceptible to heave from tree roots which is the thing I notice most frequently.

3

There is a smoothness tag (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:smoothness) but it is described as referring to smoothness for vehicles (including for cycling). I’m not aware of any equivalent for footways. Perhaps an approach might have been developed somewhere as part of systematic mapping for wheelchair users, but I don’t know of anything specific.

4

There’s a bit of use of “smoothness” in London: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1gi0 .

5

I think I’m gonna have to focus on mapping a small area of London to use in my app.

I appreciate the comments you guys sent in.

if you have any more resources to look at I would appreciate it a lot.

Cheers

6

OsmAnd app does show surface type and condition if you turn those on in map settings. I don’t know of any desktop maps that show theese two tags though.