[nurtbo]

For biking and walking, could accepting data from Strava users (or other places that let you download GPS tracks), let you infer where there are sidewalks and good bike routes?

Eg if you have 20 GPS traces in an area and they all turn at one point, that’s a good place to turn. Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?

[WorldMaker]

> Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?

There's still a quality difference between a well-worn path and sidewalk. It can be a great way to find places to build new sidewalks. (There's the classic story of the University that didn't pave sidewalks in its quad until well worn paths in the grass were visible, using essentially crowd judgement/"ant hill optimization".)

[hunter2_]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

[dghlsakjg]

This is where Strava is interesting because of how fine grained the data is.

You can reasonably assume that a place frequented by road bikers is an acceptable surface for electric scooters, or wheelchairs (the surface only, not necessarily an appropriate setting).

A well worn path will show many walkers and runners, but almost no road bikers.

I'm sure there's all sorts of accurate inferences that can be made from the data.

[retzkek]

I refer to Strava and RideWithGPS heatmaps whenever planning a new cycling or running route, and they are very useful, but they still need vetting (satellite and street view mostly) since 1) people have different tolerances for safe/comfortable interactions with traffic, and 2) road race data is often mixed in (despite users being able to tag races), which frequently are on (closed) roads you wouldn’t want to be on otherwise.

[labcomputer]

Strava already sells heatmap data to municipalities for urban planning purposes, and AFAIK anyone with a free account can see the public heatmap data (though it is probably against the ToS to incorporate it in another map without paying). It’s even tagged by modality and surface type.

[moegev]

Mapbox presumably does this now. The issue with the real world is that you do need some high quality truth data to do any decent routing. Different users/vehicles are more or less sensitive to road conditions. If you want to provide an effective micro-mobility routing solution you have to know with certainty where the sidewalks and bike lanes are, how wide they are, how f'ed-up they are and provide directions accordingly. Waiting until 10,000 different transportation agencies decide to fix sidewalks and bike lanes on different schedules and different standards isn't gonna solve issues any time soon.