User:Do not bring quebec into this
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About me!
Hello! I am a mapper from the golden horseshoe region of Ontario. The golden horseshoe is the most urban and suburbanised area of the political region Canada, and has more people living in it than some entire small countries, like Norway!
In school, we were taught it is named golden horseshoe because of the region's economic power, and also because of the unique flora that could grow here. Much of the golden horseshoe's, if not all of its, native flora, also appear in the rest of southern ontario!
I love micromapping, and I also like mapping pedestrian and cycling features especially!, with a partial goal of creating more accurate routing. I like mapping things related to accessibility, and am very interested in doing my best to make information clear and useful.
Pretty much all of my favourite mapping activities are related to micropmapping, it is pretty awesome. Going out and doing surveys just for fun to get some stuff to map is incredibly fun! It is especially fun to do with others, and explore all kinds of places.
Goals!
Hamilton Pedestrian pavement
I have been working on mapping pedestrian pavements on the sides of roads and streets in the most urban areas of Hamilton! Very few highways have been given sidewalk:* tags, so I decided I wanted to start adding pedestrian ways all across downtown Hamilton! Going out for the GPS track also lets me discover things to micro map! I have been especially interested in trying to find all of the public bookcases downtown. In this project, I am also mapping pedestrian areas of intersections. I find mapping intersections generally more engaging than mapping "sidewalks", and once they are there, it makes the workload for adding the ways between them much lighter.
For this, I consider the most urban areas of Hamilton to be the former city of Hamilton, and where houses lack much empty space between each other. One day I would also like to map upper Hamilton, and other extreme low density areas.
Hamilton bus routes
Getting around Hamilton is basically impossible for me without the HSR, there's so much I need to do in extreme auto suburbia! So, I take the bus. I've realised that, oh my god, the bus route mapping in OSM is currently a mess, and, that needs to change. This is definitely a slow project, since it really isn't all that fun for me to work on it for dedicated periods.
People permeable cul de sacs!
A cul de sac is a type of street network mesh design to ensure that no thorough traffic passes through an area (usually residential), by using confusing and nonsensical layouts, often featuring numerous no exit streets, crescent shapes and a bunch of curves, with a consistent theme of streets not intuitively connecting to others nearby. In many modern north american cul de sac suburbs, traffic types are considered equally, meaning that cyclists and pedestrians are restricted in the same ways as motor traffic. Because of the speed difference between motor vehicles and people, this negligence makes traversing suburban areas horrible for people-scaled travel modes, and creates inequitable living conditions. My goal is to find, and maintain, routes that are designed specifically for our squishy bodies to pass through in these cul de sacs, and create shortcuts for non motor traffic. Hopefully this will make routing better for people and help people find some really cool areas!
Here is an example of a people permeable cul de sac, in Hamilton Ontario. Colquhoun park, and the highlighted footpath, slash travel time for pedestrians and cyclists trying to navigate the enclosing suburb. It means that if you live on Westminster Avenue and go to Chedoke Middle School, you no longer need to travel on the major highway Garth Street, or the dangerous choke point on Scenic Drive without pedestrian paving at all. The park's north terminus also allows you to quickly get off that part of Scenic Drive!
Some strategies I try to employ!
Pedestrian Kerbs
In OSM, I try to remember to map extended kerbs at crossings differently from regular kerbs. At the intersection of Strachan and John Street, the north eastern corner has been given an extended kerb on the sidewalk! Here, I tried to map the _edge_ of footway instead of the middle of it here, in order to communicate this kerb is extended slightly into the intersection. The goal of this is to show map users crossing points that have the smallest distance between other dedicated pedestrian facilities, and to indicate that a choker is a result of a extended crossing kerb. Depending on the type and size of the kerb extension, I may map the sidewalk as its own way, and then attach smaller footways connecting it to the crossing ways, like the south west corner of this intersection (Herkimer/Caroline).
I want to try and standardise my process for doing this, and take better care to examine kerbs on surveys thoroughly.
Pedestrian Paving
In southern Ontario, the common way of referring to footways at the side of motor roads is "sidewalks". Like a lot of things with common names that are distinct between American and British English, I prefer the British variant. This is also the case for sidewalks, where I use the word pavements, and less commonly, footways and footpaths. This specific preference is uniquely a conscious decision, other specifically British English vocabulary we use naturally and out of habit, and not because we choose to!
The reasons I prefer these words is largely due to private automobiles, and the corporations that hyper accelerated their mass adoption. Sidewalks represent the sliver of space that have retained for public access, and are often treated like literal dumping grounds. I view the term sidewalk as a success of automobile lobbies to control how people live and think, and view the world around them, since sidewalk suggests it isn't important, not meaningful enough to be considered in the design of a street, because it isn't made for motorists. Sidewalk also implies a secondary tier of value by name!
Bench Tagging
I use tags on benches to indicate their kindness to sleeping and different body types. A devious field of urban design is "livening the sidewalk and eliminating undesirable blight", which basically means designing things to look attractive to tourists, mask problems and create hollow and meaningless spaces. Benches and other features are often used by homeless individuals as makeshift beds, if they aren't lucky or charming enough to live in a tent or temporary shelter. Unfortunately, it is common practice to incorporate sublte design elements that are silent for the intended audience, but make it completely impractical and even dangerous to sleep there. For these features, I tag it with sleeping_hindrance=no/armrest/surface/structure, and for benches specifically, armrest=no/edge/separator. Here are examples that include how they can be tagged.
Payment
This isn't so much a strategy, but an observation. the tags charge=*, fee=*, and payment:*=*, all seem inadequate for describing paying for things like parking, transit, etcetera. From what I know, there isn't a standardised way to indicate things like different age groups, time of day, time of week, and so on. I'd like to research to find out if there is a preferred way of doing this, potentially an undocumented way, since, this is frustrating! In addition, it is difficult to segregate these from payment type. Where I live, transit systems have different fare structures depending on if you use the transit card, or if you pay with cash, and I don't know how to distinguish those from each other, and how to separately define fares for different times and ages.
Links
- Pronoun Island, a useful and fun way to learn about pronouns, and quickly add them to your page!
- Native-Land.ca, a mapping organisation and software that tries to map Indigenous lands and languages, and the land settlers's treaties have been for.
- My OSM account
- Cyclestreets net, a UK cycling router and photomap of cycling infrastructure. very useful! quality of bicycling infrastructure, especially in UK, can vary wildly, and having accurate information and good routing is very important!
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