Any path which is intended for dedicated foot traffic is considered a footway on OSM and tagged as highway=footway. Sidewalks that run parallel to the carriageway on one or both sides of the road and foot crossings at the junctions are sometimes mapped as seperate ways to aid in wheelchair routing.

Such ways need an additional footway=sidewalk or footway=crossing tag that can be used for specialized rendering.

Unfortunately many of sidewalks and crossings on OSM don’t have these tags and we have been trying to detect where they are as part of the sidewalk-tagging project.

Check out the OSM Sidewalker Map

In the first round we added the missing sidewalk and crossing tags for major cities in US which have a high activity of Strava users who are using maps powered by OSM.

The project included adding footway=sidewalk for highway=footway which runs parallel to the carriageways and footway=crossing for highway=footway which is used for pedestrian crossing.

The number of missing tags added by the mapbox data team:

There are more sidewalks in the rest of the world that could use your love. Take a look at our mapping documentation and follow our workflow to add the missing sidewalks tags in your city.

It would be great to hear from you how to make such tools more effecient and easy to use, do share your ideas and feedback that we can incorporate in our future mapping projects.