Milhouse (2025-07-03 05:31:53+00:00): Hi shyamalashanthi!

Welcome to OpenStreetMap! My name is Steven and I do a lot of mapping in Ealing.

I see you've been mapping pavements in Northfields and though you are free to map whatever you like, wanted to check whether you understood how pedestrian routing worked and whether adding pavements was the most productive thing that could be mapped:
- Firstly it is safe to assume that any road will have pavements on both sides unless explicitly tagged in OpenStreetMap, and if you check any of the roads you are adding pavements to, you'll see that it already has "sidewalk" tags indicating for routers whether there are pavements. For example, Erlesmere Road has tags "sidewalk=both":
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/5052558#map=17/51.501547/-0.324901&layers=T
whereas Belvedere Road nearby has "sidewalk=left" because it only has a pavement on one side:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/165299914
I think one of the best aspects of OpenStreetMap is its power to provide pedestrian and cycle routing, but mapping sidewalks separately adds noise without adding much signal. Mapping footpaths where they *don't* follow roads (like across parks and common land) feels much more valuable. Any pedestrian router will assume that a road has a pavement either side.
- When you add sidewalks manually and separately, they start appearing on the map and does the absence of a sidewalk rendered on the map mean there isn't a sidewalk? Are you ready to add sidewalks everywhere?
- If you add pavements manually, you should be putting a lot of effort into ensuring the crossings are correct. For example, this footway ends without connecting back to the road in two places. It effectively creates a path to nowhere:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1411745327

I feel like there are more important worthwhile things to map. For example:
- adding addresses that are missing from houses and offices adds those addresses to Nominatim, the OpenStreetMap address lookup.
- adding buildings indicates how built up an area is, and allows others to add addresses if they can't add houses themselves
- if you are interested in pedestrian routing, then you could add crossing points to roads, for example I have added crossings on some road junctions as a trial:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/10860481957
By adding the "implied" crossings, it means I can record whether they have accessibility features like drop kerbs and tactile paving. This adds genuinely useful new information that a pedestrian router for a blind person or wheelchair user could use to select a pedestrian/wheeling route. It also means you can use "Overpass Queries" to report on how accessible an area is showing at a glance how rare accessibility features are.
- On pedestrian and wheeling routing, you could also record the surface type and smoothness of paths along canals and across parks. This could be used to inform a router for someone in a wheelchair about the relative accessibility of particular routes so that they can avoid deep gravel paths or really rutted surfaces, for example. See the canal towpath as an example where I've tried adding this information with "surface" and "smoothness" tags:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/4800268#map=17/51.500338/-0.337583&layers=D
Let me know if you'd like to discuss this further - and welcome once again, I'm so happy to see a new mapper in the area!

Steven