I am very interested in getting additional information about the type of footway (=crossing, sidewalk, path, alley, indoor…) the returned path uses.
This information is incredibly useful for anyone building a navigation application for pedestrians and in particular handicapped users.
In my case, it would allow me to signal to our visually impaired users that they are approaching a crosswalk and that they should proceed with caution. Ultimately, the goal is to help them locate the start and end of crosswalks thanks to openstreetmap data.
Does anyone else need something similar ?
In any case, amazing work, and huge thanks to the GraphHopper team and contributors for making projects like mine possible.
Which OSM tags are you looking at specifically? In any case you should be able to read them using your own tag parser to expose them to the routing engine (and thus the returned path).
The OSM tags we need at the moment are those related to footway=* .
The possible values are very important for pedestrian navigation such as whether the footway is a sidewalk or a crossing. Accessing this data in the “details” field on Route API Endpoint, alongside “road-class” for example, would be great for our needs. An alternative solution could be to add new options to “road-class” such as “footway-sidewalk”, “footway-crossing” and “footway-path”
I received an email from the Graphhopper team saying :
This is currently not possible. We do not store the information footway=* yet. You can create an issue for our routing engine to include this in the future.