As a part of regional transportation agency, we’re currently engaged in a project that involves updating certain attributes of road network data (managed lanes) within OpenStreetMap (OSM). Our goal is to ensure the most accurate and useful representation of our roadways, which benefits both the community and enhances the quality of the datasets we rely on.
We’re setting out to enhance the details of roadways without changing their geometry. Our focus is on areas where the reference names currently lack uniformity. We aim to standardize reference names and update tags for HOV lanes and tollways for better consistency. Our method involves making bulk edits through the OSM API to ensure these attributes are clear and uniform across the board.
Before we begin, we’re keen to ensure that our approach is fully aligned with the community’s guidelines. We’ve done some research on the best practices for bulk updates but haven’t found clear instructions. If there are specific guidelines or considerations for this type of update, we’d be grateful if you could point us in the right direction.
The problem with your project lies in several factors. In Dallas, the roads are owned by the North Texas Transit Authority, while the ones in Austin are owned by someone else, while the ones in Houston are by someone else. They’re gonna call them whatever the higher up of each company decide to call them.
The second thing is going to be how locals refer to something as. I may call a TeXpress lane HOV and all other lanes like the as such. Those from other parts of the country (or even world) may just refer to them as whatever they’re used to.
For a better understanding of the debate, you need to look at the debate about the naming of service roads throughout the state.
Hi, it’s great to see regional transportation agencies like yours take an interest in OSM!
Would you mind elaborating? What are some examples of inconsistencies you’ve found so far? We currently identify routes in a couple ways, so it’s possible that what you’re seeing is a legacy encoding for backwards compatibility rather than what we’d prefer data consumers to use at this point.
I supervise both the user that posted the initial message in this thread and the user that initiated the Changeset referenced in a later message, and am here to provide a little additional context.
First and foremost, we appreciate the community’s feedback as we begin to experiment with OpenStreetMap and learn how to contribute in a way that aligns with community guidelines. The resources provided in this thread have been useful.
The organization referenced in the initial post is the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG). Among many other functions, we perform short- and long-range transportation planning for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. As you would imagine, this means we maintain a wealth of information about the region’s transportation system and have a holistic sense of how it fits together. One of my goals for our data is to make it more open and accessible in cases where it is appropriate to do so. We have a significant presence on our agency’s open data portal, and we see OpenStreetMap as another means of disseminating relevant data.
We maintain close working relationships with the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA), the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), and the private companies that maintain some roadway facilities in the region through Comprehensive Development Agreements (CDAs). We are aware of how the HOV/Managed/Express lane facilities overseen by these agencies are operated and branded, and see a need to describe these facilities consistently in OpenStreetMap (particularly the Name and Reference Name tags). Examples where we’ve seen issues with names and reference names that are presented to end users in the default OSM interface:
Tolled managed lanes on IH 635 between IH 35E and US 75 in northern Dallas: These were originally described as “I 635 HOV”. While these lanes do offer discounts to HOVs at certain times of day, this does not adequately describe how they are used and is inconsistent with their branding.
Express lanes on US 67 in southern Dallas: This corridor was recently reconstructed, but most of the corridor is still described as “US 67 HOV”. While it retains special-purpose lanes at the center of the facility, the HOV requirement was removed after reconstruction. These are now toll-free “express” lanes with no specific HOV requirements to enter.
Tolled managed lanes on IH 35E between IH 635 and SL 12: Many of these links were described inconsistently, even within the same corridor. We saw ways with names and reference names like “North Stemmons Freeway Expressway” and “35Express” immediately next to or connecting with each other, even in places where there’s no real change in branding or naming of the facility.
Our changes bring consistency to how these facilities are described throughout our region, more accurately describe how some of them are operated today, and reflect the branding and signage used by the agencies that operate them.
Additionally, we have responded to related comments on the Changeset referenced above.
This has been a learning experience for us, and we hope to continue learning more. As mentioned previously, we are new to OpenStreetMap but are eager to contribute the wealth of information we have for our jurisdiction in the spirit of open data.
Thank you for these details – as someone who occasionally maps and uses the map in North Texas, I’d say we’ll take all the help we can get.
I spot-checked @Jonathan_Cupit’s changes and found them to be reasonable in general. A couple notes:
Some of the changesets (example) tagged roadways with toll=Yes or toll=No. The toll=* key should be set to a Boolean value, either yes or no in lowercase. Mainstream editors should already be enforcing these keywords; if your editor is allowing capitalized spellings, that would be a bug.
Name tags should spell out any abbreviations, other than common initialisms like “U.S.” that people normally keep abbreviated. I think name=Interstate Highway 30 HOV would be preferable to I 30 HOV. But also consider that some of these roadways might not have names apart from their route numbers, in which case name=* can be left blank. (noname=yes affirms that the lack of a name is intentional.)
The “TEXpress” branding is important to include in the roadway’s name=*, but the ref=* key on individual roadways is somewhat outmoded tagging convention. These days, we also model routes as route relations. This roadway is part of a “35Express” route relation. The Texas route tagging guide is silent on this kind of highway, but I think the route relation’s network=US:I:Express:Toll tag is consistent with the route markers. For example, OpenStreetMap Americana interprets this tag by marking it with an I-35E Express shield. (It also colors the roadway yellow based on toll=yes.)
Since you’ve taken an interest in ref=* formatting, you may be interested in this discussion about whether the ref=* tags on ways should use a postal abbreviation or align with real-world abbreviations:
I still remember when most Texas state highways were tagged like “SH 12”. I think we could return to that practice, and maybe even TxDOT’s unique “IH” prefix, if enough mappers from the state (including from your team) reach a consensus to do so. Regardless, if the organizations you work with are attempting to consume ref=* from the ways, we’d really encourage you to migrate to route relations. The unstructured ref=* key can’t really accommodate the extreme diversity of route networks in Texas.
As a former proponent of using “TX” for state highways while MapQuest Open was still active, I’m strongly in favor of using “SH” now.
I’m not as convinced on “IH” for Interstates. While it is common to see blade signs with these letters in Texas, it hasn’t caught on in colloquial speech—we still just say “I” like the rest of the country. If a Houstonian needs to turn right on IH 10 Frontage Road, they’ll probably say “turn right on the I 10 Feeder” instead.
Only certain parts of the country say the I-whatever. Here in this part of New England we tend to drop not only the, but also I, and the letter “R” in most words.
So it’s just… “jump on 95 north for a few exits, then hop on 117 and go down past where the Dunkin’ used to be.”
That would be the road name formatter (P8498) property, which is already tagged on most Wikidata items that describe route networks, including Interstates. I don’t know of any software that uses it yet. Ideally, geocoders and turn-by-turn navigation software would use this data to supplement OSM’s way and relation tags, but I recognize that it requires nontrivial work at multiple levels for existing data consumers.
In my opinion, until we’re ready to take the momentous step of eliminating ref=* tags from ways, we might as well use them to communicate the route number in a format that locals would recognize. However, I don’t think we need to get into the weeds of encoding whether locals put a definite article in front of the route number. Many languages use keys such as name:genitive=* to communicate similar grammatical properties, so some kind of ref:article=* wouldn’t be out of the question – except this isn’t very relevant to Texas. “The” appears in @clay_c’s example because it modifies “I-10 feeder”, a description of a frontage road.
In Texas, replacing the “TX” prefix with “SH” would be an obvious improvement. The overwhelming usage of “SH” in official and colloquial speech and writing is partly because Texas has many state highway networks, making “Texas” or “TX” too ambiguous. Yes, State Highway shields say “TEXAS” on them and some even bear a wavy Texas flag, but Farm-to-Market and Ranch-to-Market shields are shaped like the state.
I provide this press release and this and this as evidence that in Rhode Island, all non-Interstate routes are described as “Route X” regardless of network (could a state highway, or a US highway). Interstates are either “I-95” or just “Route 95” in vernacular, but at least RIDOT does use the I- designator for interstates.
Based on this, and since we still cannot remove them wholesale, how would you recommend tagging the ref way tags in Rhode Island? Should I say ref=Route 1 for what the rest of the country would call “US 1”? ref=Route 117 for the state route of the same name?
I would start a new discussion about Rhode Island, as it’s quite off-topic for a thread about organized editing of express lanes in the Dallas area. Maybe you don’t even need to prefix the refs for state routes in Rhode Island! Every state has different practices in naming their routes, both officially and unofficially. The status quo of postal abbreviations in most states is the closest we ever came to national consistency, and I would contend that it was for naught, because route relations are awesome.
The U.S. Numbered Highway System presents a particular conundrum, but not just for refs. It turns out that half the states call them “U.S. Routes” while the other half (including Texas) call them “U.S. Highways”. It’s a good thing we’ve segmented the route relations by state so we don’t have to debate the one true naming convention among states that won’t see eye to eye.
