Crowdsourcing and Sidewalk Data: A Preliminary Study on the Trustworthiness of OpenStreetMap Data in the US

May 16th, 2022 - Ongoing

Categories: User Groups, Visualization, Visual Analytics, Data Science, Urban Data Visualization

Sidewalk coverage of (a) Seattle, (b) a sportion of downtown Seattle, & (c) View Ridge neighborhood. Overall Seattle OSM has comparably higher sidewalk geometries mapped than other cities. However, smaller neighborhoods like View Ridge have poor coverage.
Sidewalk coverage of (a) Seattle, (b) a sportion of downtown Seattle, & (c) View Ridge neighborhood. Overall Seattle OSM has comparably higher sidewalk geometries mapped than other cities. However, smaller neighborhoods like View Ridge have poor coverage.

About

Sidewalks impart a safe walkway for pedestrians, links public transportation facilities, and equip people with limited abilities with routing and navigation services. There is a scarcity of open sidewalk data worldwide. As one of the most famous crowdsourced cartographic data repositories and the only globally available open geospatial data, OpenStreetMap (OSM) could aid the lack of open sidewalk data to a large extent. However, completeness and quality of OSM data have long been a major issue. In this research, we analyze city-scale availability and trustworthiness of sidewalk networks. As part of this work, we compare the coverage of sidewalks in OpenStreetMap across 50 cities in the US by computing the ratio of highways to sidewalk geometry and the percentage of highways containing sidewalk information. Additionally, we plot the availability of OpenStreetMap sidewalk attributes in a number of cities, and compare the distribution of trustworthiness index of sidewalks, and highways with sidewalk information in these cities.