Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
Hi, On 09/02/2014 05:27 AM, Nick Hocking wrote: I beleive that it's absolutely essential (from safety and useability perspectives) to immediately mark all these uncertain ways as unroutable. ... A bot could do this easily and then it really doesn't matter how long it takes to find the best solution. Why not simply agree on the criteria for identifying unroutable roads and publish them suitably, so that those who run routing engines can decide for themselves. It should be trivial to adapt a router's graph preparation step to ignore routes that match the criteria. Marking a road access=no without knowing whether it exists or what kind of surface or access restriction it has in reality sounds not like OSM to me. If you are so unsure about their existence, then you may need to simply remove the highway attribute... Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09 E008°23'33 ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
On 9/1/2014 11:27 PM, Nick Hocking wrote: I think thrse ways can easily be identified by... 1) They are original TIGER data import 2) They have not been edited since import 3) They are higway=residential 4) They are unnamed Another way to select roads having suspicious routing would be: Unnamed residential connecting between roads having name and/or ref. That set of roads may be small enough to be suitable for MapRoulette where they could be re-marked as track / service / etc if appropriate. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] Fw: Re: Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
I think I got unsubscribed from talk-us again on my work account (it’s not you, it’s me), reposting from my personal account: — Martijn van Exel From: Martijn van Exel marti...@telenav.com Reply: Martijn van Exel marti...@telenav.com Date: September 1, 2014 at 9:46:36 PM To: Nick Hocking nick.hock...@gmail.com, talk-us@openstreetmap.org talk-us@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway) We have seen no major routing disasters because of the largely fictional rural TIGER landscape, and I don’t feel an urgent need to do something about it on this scale. The affected areas mostly have no meaningful destinations anyway, and where they do, people will get around to updating them. We can prioritize the more meaningful areas using a TIGER ghost town analysis along the lines of the TIGER desert analysis I did some time ago: http://oegeo.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/binders-full-of-tiger-deserts/ (this would actually be fun to do. Would people fix TIGER ghost towns if I pointed them out?) highway=residential may be inappropriate, but it’s not as wrong as marking all unedited TIGER residential ways with access=no - which would make entire areas unreachable altogether. Also identifying the ‘untouched TiGER’ ways is not super straightforward as several bots have touched most ways in the US anyway, so you’d need to look at the full history to make that call reliably. -- Martijn van Exel Telenav From: Nick Hocking nick.hock...@gmail.com Reply: Nick Hocking nick.hock...@gmail.com Date: September 1, 2014 at 9:28:45 PM To: talk-us@openstreetmap.org talk-us@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway) While people work out how to remove the multitude of tiger ways that don't actually exist, downgrade others from the incorrect residential to unclassified or track depending on imagery or ground survey, and fix the geometry of all unedited TIGER data, I beleive that it's absolutely essential (from safety and useability perspectives) to immediately mark all these uncertain ways as unroutable. Whether to make them driveways or use access=no , I've no idea. I think thrse ways can easily be identified by... 1) They are original TIGER data import 2) They have not been edited since import 3) They are higway=residential 4) They are unnamed A bot could do this easily and then it really doesn't matter how long it takes to find the best solution. ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Fw: Re: Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
Apologies for the long email below, but I'll summarize my position as: a) TIGER data, while imperfect, is very useful and not particularly harmful when considered against other generally available map data. b) The distinction between unpaved roads and tracks is important c) It's often virtually impossible in forested areas to distinguish a minor gravel road from a track by orthoimages, particularly if the imagery was taken while trees had their full complement of leaves, so either alternate imagery or ground surveys are necessary to correctly tag these ways. While I can't speak to the U.S. as a whole, I can vouch for the TIGER import data around me (and in Vermont generally) as being far from perfect but also far better than no data at all. Based on a completely unscientific survey of the road history that I've examined while editing, the vast majority of ways in Vermont are TIGER imports that have been edited only by a couple of metadata-adjustment bots. The TIGER data in Vermont includes a lot of Vermont's ancient roads—legal right-of-way that vary from privately maintained but publicly accessible gravel roadway to rough woods roads and even to roadways that have returned to forest and are difficult or impossible to locate on the ground. With that said, OSM is not unique in including many of these roads in its database; Google, Garmin, and other mapping provider share many of the same errors, and even the venerable Delorme Gazetteer—by far the best indication in Vermont of whether a road goes or not—has errors. Blithely following any set of GPS directions in this state, particularly with routing set to shortest distance, is likely to put you on at least one road that isn't passenger-car friendly; I, and most other folks in Vermont, I'd wager, have a habit of reviewing Garmin's suggestions for roads named Unpaved Road, Alley, or Town Highway #33 (the last being a side-effect of all town roads in Vermont being numbered as well as named, and the class-four roads often not having proper names). With that said, we also have thousands of miles of well-maintained gravel roads that are passenger-car passable well over 95% of the time (and some very near 100%). Treating all unpaved roads as tracks would actually create a more-dangerous situation in the boy who cried wolf scenario—drivers might get accustomed to easily passable tracks and be a bit surprised when they find one that isn't. There is statewide data available from the Vermont AOT which provides better information than the TIGER data, in terms of both completeness and of accuracy, but I lack the time to figure out how to create an automated process to compare the AOT data to OSM to more quickly identify roads that are likely to be tracks. The state-provided shapefiles do have data that is rather good at distinguishing proper roadways from tracks, but the gradations of not-town-maintained road aren't applied consistently from town-to-town (what one town calls Impassable or untravelled may be primitive and unimproved in another town), and most freely available imagery from commercial sources is virtually useless for these ways—one may be able to readily pick out a few spots where there's indication of a woods road but not have any luck at all with tracing the entire way. The state has imagery from spring and fall overflights that is more helpful than Bing imagery (which seems to be consistently captured while all the trees have their full complement of leaves), but until it finished its LIDAR overflights and releases that data, most of these ways will require on-the-ground surveying to distinguish both exact route and whether or not they are passable by vehicle or foot. Updating these is one of my priorities, and I think most of the unmaintained right-of-ways in my area are now correctly tagged in OSM (and I've added many of the missing track sections that are right-of-way but not passenger-car-friendly), but that's a very small part of the country as a whole. I'd also argue that a fair number of people are misusing dirt as as surface type when gravel is more correct, both in conversation and in tagging, but that's probably a battle I'd not win. In my mind, gravel should be used for any maintained roadway where gravel has been added, while dirt would be used for roads whose surfaces are comprised of the material that happened to be there before the road was created. On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 8:05 AM, Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org wrote: I think I got unsubscribed from talk-us again on my work account (it’s not you, it’s me), reposting from my personal account: — Martijn van Exel From: Martijn van Exel marti...@telenav.com marti...@telenav.com Reply: Martijn van Exel marti...@telenav.com marti...@telenav.com Date: September 1, 2014 at 9:46:36 PM To: Nick Hocking nick.hock...@gmail.com nick.hock...@gmail.com, talk-us@openstreetmap.org talk-us@openstreetmap.org talk-us@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly:
Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
Seems to me that if a bot could easily to this then a router could do it without having a bot go through and tag things. I'd change the rules posted just a little. If… 1) Tagged with tiger:reviewed=no 2) Tagged with highway=residential 3) Missing name=* Then consider same as highway=service for routing purposes. I haven't delved into the preprocessing and database creation that any specific router does, but that does not seem undoable. I guess the issue would be convincing non-US based routing project(s) to include that logic in their database creation scripts. From: Nick Hocking nick.hock...@gmail.com Reply: Nick Hocking nick.hock...@gmail.com Date: September 1, 2014 at 9:28:45 PM To: talk-us@openstreetmap.org talk-us@openstreetmap.org Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway) While people work out how to remove the multitude of tiger ways that don't actually exist, downgrade others from the incorrect residential to unclassified or track depending on imagery or ground survey, and fix the geometry of all unedited TIGER data, I beleive that it's absolutely essential (from safety and useability perspectives) to immediately mark all these uncertain ways as unroutable. Whether to make them driveways or use access=no , I've no idea. I think thrse ways can easily be identified by... 1) They are original TIGER data import 2) They have not been edited since import 3) They are higway=residential 4) They are unnamed A bot could do this easily and then it really doesn't matter how long it takes to find the best solution. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
I think the other half of the equation, however, is actually getting this fixed across the country. At present it appears to be just a small number of mappers doing it in their areas; the US is a big place, and at the current rate it's not going to be fixed any time soon. Drive-by tools like MapRoulette are generally a good solution for systemic data quality problems, but in this case I think the problem's too big for that. ... Anything else? I certainly agree: the US is large, our mapper density here is low. That makes for slow-to-build map data. To which Michael Patrick replies: Imports. The bulk of the roads in the OSM USA came from the US Census, but fundamentally, the TIGER data base was primarily designed to support census activities. Besides the the Census Bureau, there are many other federal agencies such as the BLM, BIA, DOD, etc. and their congruent state agencies that have available detailed GIS dataset available. (Continues...) Yes, this is true. Sometimes such (federal, or state, or local, like a city GIS department) data are quite useful, sometimes such data (as TIGER) are not useful. OSM's TIGER data, many of us agree, are noisy, tagged in a uniform way (residential) when that is less than optimal, and have been discussed many times as need to be corrected. Correcting old, noisy TIGER data is possible, even by a bot, but either way, manually it is huge work (and we hardly have THAT many willing volunteers), nor have we sustained an effort to take a systematic approach to entering newer, better data, which at least partly likely means a carefully written and deployed bot. Yes, this COULD be done, and may eventually, but it is a lot of work. Let's consider it a medium-term goal. In short, there are lots of good data out there that might be imported. But, federal data (while sometimes good, sometimes bad/obsolete/noisy) often cover only federal land, state/county/local data are patchy and just that: local, and our import process is detailed and takes time, people, effort, consensus and dedication. So, results are around what we have here in the USA: a mishmash of noisy federal data that hangs over much of the rural, TIGER desert areas like an old spider web, and shiny gems of smaller pockets of attention (local areas, counties, even states) where dedicated volunteers polish up the data to be fairly useful (beautiful, routable, commercializable, extendable...). Good, but we must do better. There is no magic bullet. We want excellent data that are correct and up-to-date. We have a vast fifty states in which to do this: the fourth-largest country on Earth by area. Yet, it has been said many times: OSM in the USA has a relatively low density of users. Yes, our data get better, but not quickly. Specific and targeted projects that identify and project-manage specific sub-areas, with good discussion, consensus and roll-up-our-sleeves work is what is going to correct this. This will take time, let's just agree to that. I'd like to see (more) well-identified, well-prioritized, even-novices-can-do-this-if-they-want such projects emerge and be displayed in our wiki (or someplace) so that fired-up OSM volunteers itching to map can shop along the shelf, pick out a sub-project that gives chew-and-digest satisfaction (whether it lasts a day, a week or a month) and results in that warm feeling of accomplishment (beautiful, high quality data as useful results) once done. Now, THAT'S a crowd-sourced mapping project! We're getting there, though in a low gear. Discussions like these, some identification, some organization, some inspiration, and we will rev it up faster. Elephants are best eaten one bite at a time. (A metaphor, not literal) SteveA California___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
[Talk-us] Announcement: WashDC mapping party, 6 Sept
Hello list, Saturday, 6 September, MappingDC is collaborating with Great Streets DC, the Georgia Avenue Business Association, and local community development organization, MOMIES TLC to map the Georgia Avenue corridor.[1] This is a great opportunity to use your OpenStreetMap skills for community development. See the Meetup link[2] for registration all the details. Hope to see you there, -- SEJ -- twitter: @geomantic -- skype: sejohnson8 There are two types of people in the world. Those that can extrapolate from incomplete data. [1] Boundaries: http://ow.ly/AEd44 [2] http://www.meetup.com/MappingDC/events/202646292/ ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 9:52 AM, stevea stevea...@softworkers.com wrote: I'd like to see (more) well-identified, well-prioritized, even-novices-can-do-this-if-they-want such projects emerge and be displayed in our wiki (or someplace) so that fired-up OSM volunteers itching to map can shop along the shelf, pick out a sub-project that gives chew-and-digest satisfaction (whether it lasts a day, a week or a month) and results in that warm feeling of accomplishment (beautiful, high quality data as useful results) once done. Now, THAT'S a crowd-sourced mapping project! We're getting there, though in a low gear. Discussions like these, some identification, some organization, some inspiration, and we will rev it up faster. Elephants are best eaten one bite at a time. (A metaphor, not literal) +1 -- @osm_seattle osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
Seeing as I already spend 70% of my time mapping unpaved roads in Colorado, and I've some opinions of my own about the subject, I'm happy to set up and run wiki pages etc bout the subject if people think that this would help Mark From: Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us To: stevea stevea...@softworkers.com Cc: talk-us talk-us@openstreetmap.org Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2014 6:26 PM Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway) On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 9:52 AM, stevea stevea...@softworkers.com wrote: I'd like to see (more) well-identified, well-prioritized, even-novices-can-do-this-if-they-want such projects emerge and be displayed in our wiki (or someplace) so that fired-up OSM volunteers itching to map can shop along the shelf, pick out a sub-project that gives chew-and-digest satisfaction (whether it lasts a day, a week or a month) and results in that warm feeling of accomplishment (beautiful, high quality data as useful results) once done. Now, THAT'S a crowd-sourced mapping project! We're getting there, though in a low gear. Discussions like these, some identification, some organization, some inspiration, and we will rev it up faster. Elephants are best eaten one bite at a time. (A metaphor, not literal) +1 -- @osm_seattle osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)
I've been mapping rural area's south of Tucson for months now trying to clean up roads from the tiger import. As much help as they are they can also be a headache. Some don't exist or are miles off. I've found about 75% are actually residential roads. The other are tracks. Still have a long way to go. Every where rural i look in Arizona the roads are just a mess from the tiger and import. I'm a one man team. Don't know anyone else working on this issue. Regards, Hans On Sep 2, 2014 7:40 PM, Mark Newnham m...@newnhams.com wrote: Seeing as I already spend 70% of my time mapping unpaved roads in Colorado, and I've some opinions of my own about the subject, I'm happy to set up and run wiki pages etc bout the subject if people think that this would help Mark -- *From:* Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us *To:* stevea stevea...@softworkers.com *Cc:* talk-us talk-us@openstreetmap.org *Sent:* Tuesday, September 2, 2014 6:26 PM *Subject:* Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway) On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 9:52 AM, stevea stevea...@softworkers.com wrote: I'd like to see (more) well-identified, well-prioritized, even-novices-can-do-this-if-they-want such projects emerge and be displayed in our wiki (or someplace) so that fired-up OSM volunteers itching to map can shop along the shelf, pick out a sub-project that gives chew-and-digest satisfaction (whether it lasts a day, a week or a month) and results in that warm feeling of accomplishment (beautiful, high quality data as useful results) once done. Now, THAT'S a crowd-sourced mapping project! We're getting there, though in a low gear. Discussions like these, some identification, some organization, some inspiration, and we will rev it up faster. Elephants are best eaten one bite at a time. (A metaphor, not literal) +1 -- @osm_seattle osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us ___ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
