Assessing the Accuracy and Completeness of OpenStreetMap Sidewalks: A Comparative Study With Google Street View

OpenStreetMap is an open-source and crowd-sourced geospatial database and one of the few available sources of sidewalk data for walkability research; however, its accuracy and completeness have not been systematically assessed. This study aimed to compare OpenStreetMap sidewalk data with Google Street View.

We clipped an OpenStreetMap map of pedestrian-accessible roads in Maryland to 141 census tracts (~10.0% of census tracts in Maryland) using stratified random sampling across tertiles of population density. Fifty points within each census tract were randomly distributed across qualifying roads (n = 7,050). We determined sidewalk presence at each point in OpenStreetMap and Google Street View. We excluded points without Google Street View, resulting in a final sample of 6,103 points. In points with sidewalks in Google Street View (n = 3,674), logistic mixed effects models estimated odds of OpenStreetMap-Google Street View sidewalk agreement across population density tertiles and themes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI).

Of the total points (N = 6,103), 57.8% (3,530) indicated sidewalk agreement between OpenStreetMap and Google Street View. Agreement was 30.2% among points with sidewalks present in Google Street View. Among points with sidewalks (3,674) present in Google Street View, odds of sidewalk agreement were higher in mid-density tracts (odds ratio [OR], 2.43; 95% CI, 0.63-9.40) and high-density tracts (OR, 4.50, 95% CI, 1.16-17.38) than in low-density tracts. Tracts in which a racial and ethnic minority population was larger than the non-Hispanic White population had lower sidewalk agreement (OR, 0.11; 95% CI, 0.002-0.74); no other SVI theme was associated with agreement.

While OpenStreetMap sidewalk data were generally accurate when available, the sidewalk data were incomplete, especially in areas with low population density or areas in which a non-Hispanic racial and ethnic minority population was larger than the White population.