Hi Milhouse,

I add quite a lot of separate sidewalks and detailed crossings, because I also want effective routing for pedestrians and those with visual or mobility impairments.

The crossing tags I deleted were adding by inactive user @alisonlung (see https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/6775 ). They were using a task manager on Waymap's site and were not supervised, adding decorative sidewalks and fictitious crossings which were detrimental to pedestrian routing. They also "accidentally" broke cycle routing in a few places with their edits. Many of the crossings they added were fictions connecting decorative and now deleted sidewalks.

18 months later, I am still cleaning up the mess they made. I have just reversed a rather heavy-handed bulk deletion of sidewalks around a part of Kensal Rise which I missed earlier. Discussion of this is on the community forum:
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/undiscussed-mass-deletion-of-separate-sidewalks/117491

If you're interested in improving pedestrian routing in central London, this MapWithAI project may be of interest:
https://tasks.mapwith.ai/projects/165