Mountain Pass has very dangerous sections for Striders

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:link: My profile link : Patrick Schymitzek - CityStrides

Jamberoo Mountain Road is a road in my area that I would not dare walk or jog over.
This is in “The Council of the Municipality of Kiama”, NSW, Australia.

During normal use, it is a frequently used stretch of road with no shoulder and many blind corners.
I can’t really tag this as foot=no because the “foot” tag implies a legal condition. There are no signs that prohibit pedestrian access. So says an experienced OSM user (aharvey).
This stretch of road (“Jamberoo Pass”) is similar to a pass slightly north (“Macquarie Pass”). The latter is tagged as “highway=trunk”, which is why that gets filtered out for CityStrides.
Jamberoo Pass is tagged as “highway=secondary”. Reading the description for “highway=secondary”, I think this fits the bill. But it means CityStrides doesn’t filter it out.

I can’t find any of the 50 attributes in James’ criteria that I can choose from:

I’ve contacted the local Council (who is responsible for this road) to get their advice on whether pedestrians can access this road. If they advise not, I think I could tag this as “foot=no”. I’m not counting on any action from this angle.

OSM user aharvey has also suggested the following (from a non-CityStrides perspective), to indicate there’s no infrastructure for pedestrians:

  • sidewalk=no (no footpath alongside the road);
    • shoulder=* (is there a shoulder that may provide some space for pedestrians); and/or
    • barrier=guard_rail (but only if we can somehow tag if there is space to walk outside the guard rail).

There are sections of this that are walkable. There are sections where it’s steep on both sides (cliff on one side and drops off on the other), with no shoulder. So, I can see a possibility here, in splitting the way into shorter ways, to identify those that are walkable (due to a sufficient shoulder) and other segments that really are not practical (or safe).

At this stage, I cannot really split this and mark segments as “foot=no”. Is there any advice on how I could tag those segments, or does it make sense to add “shoulder=no” as a filter criterion?

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Yeah, this is an incredibly difficult topic in the OSM world.

Their goal is to map the ground truth which leaves little to no room for mapping the concept of safety, since what’s deemed safe by one person could be deemed unsafe by other - it’s a personal/subjective view.

I don’t have any helpful information for you. I can only commiserate.
If the street sometimes closes to traffic, you might take the opportunity to run/walk it then (it’s what I did for an unfriendly hill near me - check out all 5 images). Otherwise, it might be ok to mark it manually complete (in the vertical three dot menu on the street’s page).

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Thanks, James. That’s something.
On a theme of your suggestion, I might get a friend to drive me up there, jump out and do a bit, with him following me, and jump back in his car when we hold up traffic.

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