Avoidance Mapping: What It Is and Where It Fits in the Cartography Cube

There are places you're fine walking in daylight, but not at night (e.g., it's deserted, or has bars/clubs prone to drunk violence, or muggers looking for drunk people walking home).

And major streets that are heavy with pollution and horn-honking weekdays, and during peak commute hours have lots of red light running and aggro turns on or off side streets, but are relatively peaceful on weekends.

When it's snow and ice conditions, some stretches of sidewalk are orders of magnitude more injury-prone than alternate routes. And some other stretches don't have slip hazards, but are very hard to pass, because snow has been plowed of streets/yards or cleared off cars onto the sidewalk and intersection curb cuts. And in heavy rain, flooded storm drains in an intersection can mean a big detour, if you don't want to get icky flood water out of your shoes after you defrost your feet.

Constant road work can mean big detours on foot, as well as sudden hearing-damage-level noises, risk of flying debris and shrapnel, dust and fumes, danger from heavy equipment, and (especially) danger from distracted motorists who often act crazy around construction.

In the summer, one side of the street might be in the shade while the other is not, which can be a huge difference. To a lesser extent, in winter, one side of the street might be noticeably warmer or less windy.

I've also avoided stretches of street due to panhandlers there.

And there's things you might not guess, but particular to a locale. Here, there's one particular ambulance company who lately has sirens louder than any other company or emergency vehicle, and I encounter them almost every day. Much more often on major streets, but I recently had one of them hit the siren on a narrow side street, at full blast, while I was standing a few feet away, waiting for them to pass, which was even worse than on a major street. I wonder how much a to-the-second data feed of ambulance movements, any public info of their tasking, and predictive modeling of their routes, would help walkers minimize being within hearing damage range of them.

If I ever strike it rich at a startup, one of my post-FIRE projects will be to integrate some of this information to some open source/data project, like OpenStreetMap and Organic Maps.

Isn’t this Sapir-Worff all over again? The obvious hazard is that the thesis flatters the ego of the specialist, by elevating their specialty above all others.

And more generally this reads like the product of an academic culture that has become insular and fallen in love with its own toolkit of jargon.