We’d like to share a quick overview of a mapping initiative we’re currently working on, aimed at improving walking navigation across the United States through OpenStreetMap (OSM).
Our distributed team—based in India and California—is contributing by:
Creating and updating walking paths and sidewalks to enhance walkability and pedestrian routing in OSM.
Collaborating with local operations teams and referencing aerial imagery and street-level images to ensure data accuracy.
Following OSM’s Organized Editing Guidelines to maintain transparency, uphold quality, and align with community best practices.
This work is part of Uber’s broader mission to support seamless, accessible navigation in dense urban areas where pedestrian infrastructure is key to mobility and delivery.
We’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions, especially from U.S.-based mappers—on tagging standards, validation techniques, or specific areas you think need more attention.
We are reviewing road segments city-wide using Bing Maps and Mapillary imagery to identify missing footways, crosswalks, and connectivity at locations with lowered curbs, by comparing with existing data. Inputs from the field team are also used to validate and refine our findings
Upon reviewing the two changesets, one was an internal edit by our Uber team — the road was created by them and later deleted by us. The other resulted from a policy misunderstanding within the team, which was an oversight on our part. We’ve since clarified OSM policies with the team.
Perhaps I missed it, but are there particular cities that you are working within? Are there any tools, techniques or queries that you are using to identify road segments with possible missing paths and sidewalks or are you just “panning and scanning”? Even doing this for one moderate sized city seems like an enormous effort.
Are you mapping sidewalks as separate features, or just adding the appropriate tags to the corresponding road segments?
This is primarily a “pan and scan” effort, with a focus on urban areas within cities where pedestrian infrastructure is most critical. We have initially started with Austin, Texas, and plan to expand our efforts to other major U.S. cities over time.
Our main objective is to ensure that pedestrian connectivity reflects the ground reality. To achieve this, we assess whether existing path and sidewalk connections are accurately represented. Depending on the context and existing mapping conventions, we either map sidewalks as separate features or apply appropriate tagging directly to the relevant road segments to ensure consistency and alignment with the work of other mappers and existing data.
Well, I’m not sure you have many sidewalks to add in Austin - getting them all completely mapped was my big project last year. I don’t know of any more that need to be added (or I would have added them already!)
But, my next project was going to be cleaning up and organizing the sidewalk tags on the roads to match. So, happy to share that task, as it’s a bit of a beast.
It is not that large but has some errors. What was your process and quality control on this? Marking crossings as unmarked when they are clearly marked on imagery.
That changeset cites Esri aerial imagery which appears out of date - @Tulasig I’d recommend encouraging participants to use Bing imagery by default (it is usually the most up-to-date and highest-quality in the US) and check multiple sources.
@GA_Kevin and @Lumikeiju Thanks for highlighting this. We also observed the gap in referring the Aerial Imagery and we are fixing it. Based on the suggestion we will be using Bing Aerial Imagery
