The assessment of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data quality has become an interdisciplinary research area over the recent years.Assessing the credibility of VGI sources has become a significant research topic in a variety of disciplines over the past few years (Flanagin and Metzger 2008). The complexity of the OSM
This article assesses the completeness of bicycle trail and on-street lane features in OpenStreetMap (OSM). Comparing OSM cycling features with reference data from local planning agencies for selected US Urbanized Areas shows that OSM bicycle trails tend to be more completely mapped than bicycle lanes. Manual evaluation of mapped cycling features in OSM and Google Maps for selected test areas within the Central Business Districts of Portland (OR) and Miami (FL) through comparison with governmental datasets, satellite imagery, and Google Street View, shows that the Bicycle layer in Google Maps can help to identify some missing or erroneously mapped OSM cycling links. However, Google Maps was also found to have some gaps in its data layers, suggesting that consultation of current trail and lane data from local planning authorities, if available, should be considered as an additional data source for bicycle related planning projects.
Availability of a transit service is a key factor in a traveler's choice of transportation mode. Transit service is a realistic option only if the service is available at or near locations when a person plans to travel. Whereas various measures exist for transit availability such as service frequency, the focus of this study was on the spatial aspect of pedestrian accessibility to transit stations, that is, on service coverage. Service areas are commonly used to visualize accessibility for pedestrians to transit systems and to analyze the potential ridership. Because the service area for a station is defined over the maximum network walking distance from a transit station, a complete street network that includes pedestrian segments, that is, shortcuts, is highly important for a realistic assessment of service areas. Whereas most proprietary geodata providers concentrate solely on car-related geodata, public domain street data and volunteered geographic information, such as OpenStreetMap, provide a potential valuable source for pedestrian data. The authors compared the amount of pedestrian-related data between freely available sources (OpenStreetMap or TIGER or both) and proprietary providers (Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ or both). The effect on modeling transit accessibility for pedestrians was analyzed for five U.S. and four German cities, and differences between these two countries were identified.
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