All roads lead to Rome

[apm-wa (Allan Mustard)]

Very interesting article on mapping of ancient Roman roads. Not a call to action! I am merely sharing something of general cartographic interest.

Stunning map of ancient roads will give you a good reason to think about the...

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

The article is about itiner-e, for those who want to hit the road right away. There’s some prior art in Stanford ORBIS, OmnesViae, and Viabundus. It’s exciting to see so much interest in adding the time dimension to transportation. These are all academic-oriented projects, which leave us craft mappers with a bit of FOMO. For those of us who never met a map we didn’t want to edit ourselves, OSM includes some fragmented coverage of extant Roman roads, while OHM has rapidly growing coverage of roads regardless of time period. So consider this a call to action!

Using QLever, you can easily compute the maximum territorial extent of the Roman Empire, then get all the roads known to exist at that point in time, 32 488 kilometers in all (20,187 mi.). By (an unfair) comparison, OSM has only 2 730 kilometers of explicitly tagged Roman roads (1,696½ mi.).

OHM doesn’t have a routing engine set up yet, but @SK53 experimented with the idea more than a decade ago. These days, it seems to be much more technically feasible, in case anyone reading this has a bit of spare time to help us build a new service that might find an audience after all:

Set up router based on OHM road network

(The statistics in this post are only possible because QLever was recently fixed to report distances in meters instead of degrees of arc.)

[Nielkrokodil]

The website seems to be down, but 2015 all osm roads to rome were routed with beautiful results.

[dieterdreist (Martin Koppenhöfer)]

@Minh_Nguyen

For those of us who never met a map we didn’t want to edit ourselves, OSM includes some fragmented coverage of extant Roman roads, while OHM has rapidly growing coverage of roads regardless of time period. So consider this a call to action!

I would guess those historic=roman_road that are not observable as ancient roman now, might also not always be at the exact same position as the historic road.

There is also the possibility to tag a road with historic:civilization=ancient_roman, which I do when the actual paving looks roman (although I guess some of them are reconstructed, observable when the traces of the wheels on the stones are not in the direction of the road)
877 roads have the key historic:civilization | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo

Some years ago I spotted a small stretch of Roman Road at a highway rest area in Austria, in the small print of the sign it said it was reconstructed approximately at the right place (imaginably the right place could be the motorway).

Other spots suggest there could be more if you dig, e.g. here to the left:

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@dieterdreist

Some years ago I spotted a small stretch of Roman Road at a highway rest area in Austria, in the small print of the sign it said it was reconstructed approximately at the right place (imaginably the right place could be the motorway).
Other spots suggest there could be more if you dig, e.g. here to the left:

Heh, patricians in modern chariots don’t have to worry about this particular Roman road, only the plebeians on two wheels.