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I highly suspect Apple and Google maps are auto tracing satellite images. Apple maps has perfect coverage of every road marking on their maps that exactly lines up to the satellite images.

I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.

by rafabulsing7 hours ago|

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It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

by maxerickson6 hours ago|

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There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country.

That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.

One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.

by rafabulsing6 hours ago|

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That's true, but the very feeling that I might be inputting things in a way that might have to be updated later kinda drained my motivation.

I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.

But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

by nradov5 hours ago|

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At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.