I want to express my strong dissatisfaction with the #adt team in Sarawak. I understand that contributing to OpenStreetMap is a communal effort where everyone agrees on edits, but Sarawak and Sabah are different from Peninsular Malaysia/Malaya. Unlike Malaya, arterial roads here are considered primary highways because they connect towns to towns, while long roads linking multiple villages to primary roads should be classified as secondary, and roads connecting to a single village or hamlet are tertiary in Sarawak.
My frustration is that your team has downgraded some major, busy roads to mere tertiary or even unclassified/minor, which is worse, despite these roads being maintained annually by JKR Sarawak and officially gazetted with their own road codes. These are not “minor/unclassified” roads. Any road with a designated road code should be at least tertiary. The way your team downgrades roads in Sarawak makes it seem like the state is overly rural, underdeveloped, and poorly connected between cities and rural areas, which is completely false.
Do better. I believe most of your team members are not even Sarawakians, or worse, not Malaysians, and Borneans know the proper road classifications better. I’m not saying I’m perfect—I’ve mistakenly overclassified a road before—but I apply logic to my edits. For your reference, here’s a quick guide:
If the road connects town to town (arterial road) = primary
If the road connects from primary to multiple villages = secondary
If the road connects from primary to a single village/hamlet = tertiary
Thank you for sharing your concerns regarding classification tagging practices in Sarawak. I want to emphasize that our team values the collaborative nature of OSM and prioritizes aligning with local community standards and expectations.
At present, the Malaysian Tagging Guidelines allow for a degree of subjectivity and interpretation, particularly when it comes to applying classifications across different regions and accounting for the nuances between local networks and the broader Malaysian highway system. Given this flexibility, our approach has been to evaluate roads within the context of the surrounding network, with the goal of maintaining consistency across Malaysia while respecting the patterns established by the local mapping community. That said, achieving true alignment depends on having clear, region-specific guidance documented on the OSM wiki so that all contributors can apply classifications consistently.
Clearer guidance that distinguishes practices in Sarawak and Sabah from those in Peninsular Malaysia would be especially valuable. In addition, documenting state gazetted roads and their associated reference numbers, supported by official sources, would greatly improve the ability to identify and classify these roads accurately.
Thank you again for raising these points and for your continued engagement. We appreciate your patience and look forward to working together toward clearer, more consistent guidance.
Thanks for replying and taking on the role as representative for the #adt team focusing on Sarawak. I agree that the Malaysian Roads Tagging is outdated (last updated in 2022, four years ago), and that the current guidelines are noticeably ambiguous and incomplete, leaving room for interpretation. I’ve updated the guidelines with the latest information I know, but only for road sections applicable to Borneo, leaving the rest of the content as is so as not to dictate road tagging norms for the Malaysian OSM Community in Peninsular Malaysia.
Feel free to follow the updated guidelines for Borneo roads and share them with your colleagues and editing team who primarily focus on Sarawak and Sabah. I hope these updates will reduce ambiguity and room for interpretation, helping road mapping in Sarawak and Sabah achieve better standards and a more systematic approach.
To determine if a road in Sarawak is gazetted as a state road, the easiest way is to check the maintenance signboard located at the beginning and end of the road. If visiting in person is challenging, you can use Google Street Map (latest 2023 or newer) to view captured images of these signboards, which can help confirm the road’s status.
If the image is blurry or you want to double-check the road code, you can email JKR Sarawak or, if possible, the JKR Divisional Offices for official confirmation.
For your information, some state roads in Sarawak have been upgraded to dual carriageways with partial access roads, and technically, these roads can be classified as trunk.
Thank you for updating the Malaysian Roads Tagging Wiki with guidance specific to Sarawak. I appreciate the effort you’ve put into this, this region-specific documentation is valuable in helping OSM contributors align with local practices. Our team will review the updates outlined in the wiki and take them into account when working with state gazetted roads moving forward. If any questions come up, we’ll be sure to reach out.
