Hi everyone, I have launched a new MapRoulette challenge: United Kingdom - Fix Inconsistent Highway Classification MapRoulette. We have generated tasks where we identified cases where higher-class road segments unexpectedly transition to lower-class road segments or vica versa. Most of these tasks represent situations where a short segment of a road is surrounded by road segments of a higher or lower road class where there does not appear to be any logical reason for being so.
The inconsistency of road classifications impact optimal routability of the OSM map causing routing engines to potentially look for alternative longer routes.
Most of these tasks can be resolved using available imagery, aerial and ground level, and knowledge of UK road standards, though local knowledge will helpful as well.
Our editing team plans to pick-up this challenge in a couple of weeks starting after December 9th, 2025.
As always, the challenge is public, so anyone that’s interested can review and/or work the tasks. Should you have any questions or comments please do reach out to me via my profile page, or email us osm@tomtom.com or message us via the challenge. Best regards Chris
Can you explain in a bit more detail (perhaps with code) how this list was generated?
As an example, this node was the second one shown to me. I can see that there are several different road classes there, and based on the imagery (I’m not familiar with the road myself) I probably wouldn’t have mapped it that way, but it’s well within the tolerance of “how people map tertiary roads” in the UK.
Also - given that many of these involve tertiary roads I’d suggest using a background map that shows them as a different colour to unclassified and residential (which the two available ma backgrounds do not.
Please say what you’re actually doing: as in, a human-readable description of the query that you are running to identify these “situations”.
A quick gander suggests to me that you’re looking for tertiary dead-ends onto highway=unclassified or =residential, but it would be good to have clarity.
Hi Richard and SomeoneElse, thank you for your comments and question. I will get back to you with some details that hopefully will answer your question. Regards
Hi There, My apologies for the delay in getting back to you, combination of factors. I hope that the following helps to explain our objective and the process to generate these tasks.
Our goal was to detect places where the continuity of the road class is disrupted by a sudden change to another class, that did not logically appear correct by other conditions in the map, on a short or long section of the road, between two nodes or intersections.
The following is additional detail, that defines the process to achieve the tasks generated. Probably more detail than you may want but I want to be fully transparent about the process.
Elements are selected from the line layer which have values in the highway column: highway IN (motorway,motorway_link,trunk,trunk_link,primary,primary_link,secondary,secondary_link,tertiary,tertiary_link,living_street,residential,road,raceway,service,track,unclassified).
Only points that have one of the listed types remain in the analysis for this initial pilot version:
=VALUE(highway) like %motorway
OR
=VALUE(highway) like %trunk
OR
=VALUE(highway) like %primary
OR
=VALUE(highway) like %secondary
OR
=VALUE(highway) like %tertiary
Points are additionally checked and removed if they touch one of the geometry types: country’s border, military area, aerodrome/areaways areas and their duplicates in bridge/tunnel location are removed