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Comment by atollk | Hacker News Reader

I love the project idea, unfortunately I had bad experiences with the community. I had lots of fun walking my neighbourhood to perform quests in the app until like one or two other users started reverting my edits. I checked their comments and it was some weird pedantic arguments, like I shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking; the fact that it's basically a highway with no sidewalk would not matter.

I ended up digging through the OSM wiki for definitions and rules to argue my case but in the end it felt very much like people on a power trip insistent on getting their way. It has ruined the fun in StreetComplete for me and I haven't participated since.

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This has been the most controversial quest in StreetComplete for a while. Following several discussions about it, I have now removed it for the upcoming version (i.e. v64.0).

Can you steelman the case of the users who reverted the above commenters' edits?

In most countries, walking on a controlled-access highway[1] is specifically illegal. Why should it not be marked as non-walkable just because there's no signage?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled-access_highway

In some countries it is legal to walk in places where it is dangerous and noone would ever do it.

Maybe it was such case?

OP's comment:

> it's basically a highway with no sidewalk would not matter.

"Basically a highway" and "a highway" is different!

In my experience all highways have markings explicitly banning walking (among other things). So it sounds like OP was making a judgement call based on the fact that there's no sidewalk.

I have the unfortunate experience of walking alongside certain roads without sidewalks. It's not fun by any means but I wouldn't want OSM to outright say that it's not walkable.

Of course it maybe "actually" was a highway.

In Taiwan they mix "positive" and "negative" indication signs.

So for example, you'll see a sign indicating cars are OK for a freeway. That means, heavy motorcycles and scooters are NOT ok. You can only take your heavy motorcycle on it if it also has a heavy motorcycle sign. But SOMETIMES they'll use the slightly different motorcycle sign which means scooters ok. Well, if it's ok for scooters, it must be ok for heavy motorcycles as well, right? Wrong! Heavy motorcycles must then take the car lane, if there's a lane marked for scooters.

Also sometimes there's a road marked no cars! Scooters ok. Heavy motorcycles? Who knows!

As for pedestrians: lol just die

Cars ok, heavy motorcycles ok scooters not ok: https://taipeiscooterrentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/...

Cars ok, heavy motorcycles ok, scooters not ok by implication: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/rent-motorcycle-taiwan/cars_...

Quick, google is telling you you need to cross this river, are you allowed on this road or not??? https://www.google.com/maps/@25.0756527,121.6435485,3a,75y,9...

Time to head back to Taipei proper after hanging at e7play, let's cross the river... oh wait, there's 600 cars behind you blaring their horns as you enter this intersection, which way are you going? Can you go straight?? Who knows! https://www.google.com/maps/@25.0722621,121.4934581,3a,75y,4...

I've had plenty of friends bicycle into places they apparently aren't allowed to. There's no sign that says no, but the bicycle isn't allowed by the implication of some combination of allowed-vehicle signs that are lacking a bicycle-allowed sign.

WHat is the definition of a highway?

In the UK you can walk on any road except a Motorway. Non of this is signed.

In the UK there are many places to get somewhere you have to walk on a road (even A roads) that does not have a pavement (US sidewalk)

OSM originated in the UK so it uses UK norms for most things. You wouldn't need to tag a motorway as not allowing pedestrians because that's already implied by the fact that it's tagged as a motorway.

What OP was (probably) doing was tagging roads that aren't motorways and that have no sign banning pedestrians with `foot=no`, which is only supposed to be used in situations where walking is illegal or impossible. Eventually more experienced mappers noticed what OP was doing and reverted a bunch of his edits, which isn't a great feeling, particularly if you've been mapping that way for a while before anyone noticed

(If OP was using StreetComplete I'd blame StreetComplete for this more than the OP. They used to have a quest for pedestrian walkability that was poorly worded, which they've since removed because it was leading to exactly this kind of confusion.)

In UK there is no such thing as a highway so I am still confused as to what highway is.

Your explanation of why edits were reverted makes sense

Data needs a confidence score.

eg "Earth: mostly harmless."

Just tag POI, they get stale so quickly. Everybody wants to tag the roads, but the real gap in many places is stale POI, or missing tags like opening hours. You'll get much less attention from these gatekeepers there too

It's not pedantic, it's just the way it is. For OSM to be valuable it needs to be consistent. There are many tags available but the "you can't walk here" tag is about whether you have a right to walk there. There are many highways you wouldn't want to walk on, but there are other tags to indicate that, like speed limit and presence of footpaths etc.

Saying a path can't be walked has pretty large consequences since routing apps will refuse to use them for walking directions. A highway with no footpath does seem extreme enough to warrant refusing to route for walking directions, but otherwise it's best to not block walking unless it's literally impossible or illegal to walk there.

Aren't there many places where a highway with no sidewalk is the only walkable option? So if someone saw your not-walkable, they might think not walkable at all.

Seems like you guys had two different perspectives, both arguably right. Maybe it needs to be split into technically-walkable and comfortably-walkable layers.

Or add a "probability of injury or death" attribute for more granularity.

Walkability based on time of day?

The trouble is you start getting into subjectivity. Some people are comfortable with vie ferrate, many are not. The only thing you can do is tag with objective features that can be verified on the ground, including physical features and legal restrictions that are indicated by signage.

Rather than compressing a judgment about reality into a single boolean, it seems more natural to break it down into smaller observations and evidence, then derive conclusions from them. Users wouldn't need to touch the ontology directly; they'd just answer small, concrete questions like "Is there a sidewalk here?"

FWIW this is exactly how it works on OSM, and probably why OP is complaining people were being pedantic by telling him he "shouldn't mark a street as not walkable because there is no official sign that prohibits walking".

"Would an ordinary person want to walk here?" is pretty subjective. "Are people legally prohibited from walking here?" is pretty objective. Generally only the latter would be recorded in OSM.

I actually feel better about making edits if I know people may revert them. I don't have the time or interest to dig in deeply to what exactly they want, so I normally wouldn't contribute. But if I know people double check and fix mistakes, I'm more likely to try and be helpful with the app.

"I feel more comfortable contributing to huge open source projects through the use of AI because I know that the maintainers will review my code for me and catch the issues I didn't"

I don't want to attribute anything to how you expressed that you feel, but I believe that this is what's known as "Deferral of Responsibility" and it can actually _negatively_ impact the quality of the data you are claiming to want to help curate.

Please don't use quotes in this context, you're putting words in someone else's mouth that the person did not say and did not mean. In this case, the contributor is making a good faith effort to help, providing data that no one else is in a position to provide, and worries less because any issues can be corrected. In the AI case, anyone can run the slop generator and massive changes can be produced that overwhelm the ability of maintainers to check. It's not the same.

Respectfully I disagree. The purpose of quoting is to present a hypothetical statement that I believe is comparable to what the original person wrote. This is a common and well-known method of communicating such a comparison in a concise way.

As I wrote in my original post, I am not attributing any intent to what the person wrote, and am focusing on how what they are describing is equivalent in nature to the hypothetical statement I presented and can actually be harmful, even if the intentions are pure.

While the scope of the issues being compared is not equivalent, you're excluding from your rebuttal the scores of low-experience developers submitting changes to open source projects with their own pure intentions.

To borrow your own words; those contributors are making a good faith effort to improve the open source project by providing AI-generated change requests that they believe no one else is in a position to provide (time, priorities, etc), and worry less because any issues with their submissions can theoretically be corrected by the maintainers.

Please take some time to understand the nuance in the statements I am making. I assure you I chose my original words with intent.

Quotes should be something that the person literally said. Sorry. Taking more time isn't going to change my mind on that.

I could have framed it better through the use of "It's like saying..." or something equivalent. There's clearly a spectrum in how folks handle nuance in a text post online. I should have accounted for that in my original post.

It’s tricky and maybe locale specific. A lot of roads near me have no pavement. You have to anticipate pedestrians, cyclists and horses on the road. Not at the same frequency as motor vehicles but not completely out of the ordinary.

Had exactly the same experience with Wikipedia. I think this kind of projects attract certain personalities who have nothing better to do than to exercise their virtual power. Good product and community design in this space is badly needed

Are they actually checking for said signs? In the US, freeways have explicit no-pedestrian signs at on-ramps from other roads and streets. But those can be miles apart while potential places for a pedestrian to approach the freeway might be more frequent.

> it felt very much like people on a power trip

New to online communities, are you?

If you were using StreetComplete I don't think you would have run into that. StreetComplete is very beginner friendly, and I don't think you can use it to mark a road as prohibiting pedestrians (which, as you discovered, is easy to get wrong if you don't understand what you're doing). You can use StreetComplete to mark whether there's a sidewalk or not, but I don't think anyone would object to you marking roads without sidewalks as not having a sidewalk.

Nevermind, I was wrong. Looks like they added a quest for this recently, and they're removing it now because it the wording of the quest didn't really match the tags it was applying when you solved it.

I'd personally never seen that quest myself, but looking at it now I can see why they're removing it.

You would think photo evidence would be helpful here.

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