Help reverting changes to crosswalks!

Hey all, I’m a bit new to OSM editing and I seem to have made a small mistake in a lot of my new edits - I’ve been going around my local area (Somerville MA) and adding crosswalks as “Pedestrian Crosswalk” in ID. I tried to do as much reading as possible before making a large number of changes, and I think most of my edits/additions are accurate.

The problem is that I failed to realize the distinction between “Pedestrian Crosswalk” in ID, which results in crossing=zebra and “Street Crossing”, which there are some existing on the map as crossing=traffic_signals.

I misunderstood “Street Crossing” to mean a street intersection, and I remarked a lot of them to “Pedestrian Crosswalk”, which defaults to crossing=zebra which I think is supposed to mean without signals and just street markings.

I think it still makes sense for my newly marked crosswalks to stay as crossing=zebra, since I can’t tell from aerial imagery whether or not it has a signal, but I think I should revert all existing crossings that I changed from crossing=zebra back to the previous value.

Luckily, I think that other tags are unaffected, like button_operated=yes seem to remain. Please correct me if I am wrong about this. Basically I clicked on a lot of "Street Crossing"s and changed them to "Pedestrian Crosswalk"s.

TL;DR, I would like help reverting (the intersection of all crosswalks that were not created by me && crosswalks edited by me), revert any edits made by me to the crossing tag. Any position changes should be valid.

It might also help if someone could help me query for all crosswalk IDs deleted by me so I can manually check whether I recreated them in a nearby spot with incorrect values. This should be a very small number I think.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - I feel really bad for potentially messing up the local area. and Feel free to correct me if I am still misunderstanding the usage of the crossing values.

You might want to try to learn JOSM. This isn’t an ordinary revert, where the whole of a changeset is backed out. It needs you to do a search for specific items, an only to correct some tags.

I’m fairly sure that you can do a search within JOSM, based on your user name, crossing=zebra, and version > 1 to find everything that you changed to crossing=zebra. You can then, individually, request history, to see how they were previously tagged. With JOSM, you can create filters, so that you can only select, or even only see, selected objects.

Note that even mechanical reversion just applies a new update, with the old values; it doesn’t remove all trace of the old values, so a piecemeal correction is no worse than a mechanical reversion.

You should also be able to use overpass, to do the same search on the web, but I’m not sufficiently familiar with it to be able to work out the query quickly. You will have to open each object that it finds, individually, to correct it.

Doing this search:

user:Stephen304 version:2-100 crossing=zebra

on JOSM, on part of your mapping area (possibly not all), produces the following list:
node 1965455023,node 61182441,node 1039714964,node 61179910,node 1039715142,node 1965454411,node 71915271,node 1965454412,node 1965454413,node 1039714931,node 1965454416,node 1038907959,node 1038908154,node 1977481481,node 1039715009,node 1038908118,node 1965455059

Assuming all your edits are within a few miles of each other, if you give the bounding box, I can re-run that with that bounding box, but doing it yourself will be even better.

NB If someone else changes them, this user based search will no longer work, so you might want to check for recent changes by anyone, with crossing=zebra.

Thanks so much for the query! I made sure to download the entire area containing my edits, and the query seems to return only 25 nodes. The only problem is that I don’t seem to be able to see whether the node had crossing=traffic_signals before I changed it. For example, node 1038907959 I am almost certain the change in ID from “Street Crossing” to “Pedestrian Crosswalk” changed it from crossing=traffic_signals to crossing=zebra.

As it is, it appears to me that none of my changes destroyed the information of any crossings having signals, and think that would be technically okay (although a ground survey would be necessary to switch lots of crosswalks to “traffic_signals” since I know for certain tons of them are signalled / button operated). But I want to be sure I’m not using JOSM wrong since this doesn’t seem right - perhaps I caught the mistake as soon as I saw a crosswalk with crossing=traffic_signals since I am pretty observant. Or maybe I need to download history information or something for JSOM to display the previous values for crossing?

Other than these 25 nodes, the only other consideration I think is any highway=crossing that I deleted, which I may have placed back incorrectly, and any highway=crossing that someone else edited after me.

JOSM has a menu item to view the history on the web page, which will check if JOSM is getting the history right. However, I would think that JOSM is right and no crossing type was set before, in which case crossing=zebra should be deleted, rather than replaced, if they type is unknown.

In that case, should I also delete crossing=zebra on all of the new crosswalks I created as well? I noticed that zebra isn’t actually documented as a value in the wiki, and all I know for sure is that all these crosswalks have zebra markings as seen from aerial since I haven’t been to all of them personally (yet).

I’m not sure why ID automatically puts crossing=zebra on pedestrian crossing.

This is one reason why you should always put a source on the data. If it appears that they are zebra crossings on Bing, and you say your source is Bing, it is reasonable to mark them as such. If people have on the ground knowledge, that contradicts this, they can reasonably rely on it, and if they doubt your classification, they can go to the same Bing images to make their own judgement.

crossing=zebra is actually in the wiki ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:crossing ), but is a UK only short cut. Outside the UK, you should use:

highway=crossing
crossing=uncontrolled
crossing_ref=zebra

Dropping the later tags, if they are uncertain.

Zebra is a term used by the UK government, and probably has no real meaning outside the UK, but has been adopted, by OSM, to cover similar designs, elsewhere. In colloquial British English, “pedestrian crossing” tends to me zebra crossing, more than any other type.

Ah I see. The way me and the people I know use it, zebra just refers to the striped paint on the road. So we call any crossing with the stripes, signalled or not, a zebra crossing.

They are commonly called zebra crossings here too and I expect it is a common term in many countries.

Just to provide closure to this thread, and to possibly help anyone else with similar issues, I just removed crossing=zebra from every highway=crossing last edited by me, which would be any I created or edited to have crossing=zebra. I then searched for “highway=crossing crossing=zebra” and checked each one’s history to make sure there wasn’t any I missed due to someone editing after me (it was only 55 nodes). All in all less than 10 minutes work.