Directed Editing/Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC)

This page describes directed editing activities associated with PSRC’s Sidewalk Data Collection/Consistency Pilot. This page will be updated as needed.

About our organization

The Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) is a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) composed of over 80 jurisdictions, including four counties, cities and towns, ports, state and local transportation agencies and tribal governments within the region. The region covers the counties of King, Kitsap, Snohomish and Pierce in Washington State.

Goals

The purpose of this pilot is to better assess pedestrian connectivity in the central Puget Sound region, particularly regarding access to transit and connectivity within urban centers. This effort tests how OpenStreetMap can be utilized as a method to collect pedestrian data consistently region-wide and explore how PSRC, and potentially other government agencies, can contribute to, utilize and share consistent data.

As OSM is new for PSRC and for many municipalities within the region, this effort explores the process of editing in OSM to add pedestrian networks using the OpenSidewalks method proposed by the University of Washington eScience Institute, in collaboration with Urban@UW and Microsoft.

PSRC will conduct a pilot to add sidewalks within ½ mile radius of existing or planned high capacity transit locations at various sites across the central Puget Sound region. We will then document the amount of staff time it takes and explore other methods for contributing pedestrian network data to OSM such as using imports. Once we better understand the level of commitment and better understand the benefits, PSRC may continue contributing to OSM and/ or encouraging other municipalities to do the same in a consistent manner. This may include providing information about our pilot or providing information for others new to OSM.

Tools

Our team uses JOSM for or idOpenSidewalks for editing along with many of the publicly available JOSM plugins. We manage our own workflow and will post additional tools if we decide to use them. If we begin another process (such as imports), this page will be updated with the process and tools.

Data

We use many of the data sources that are publicly available to all OSM mappers. Whenever we use third party datasets, such as municipal data, we will list those datasets as part of our project description. We only use datasets that have a license that is known to be compatible with ODbL or where we have received permission in writing.

Contact

You can contact the team through PSRC_JeanK (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) or at PSRC-OSMPSRCorg.

Our team members all have dedicated OSM accounts that start with PSRC_. Our policy is to respond to any mapping related inquiry within 24 hours (during the work week).