The wiki (highway=construction) mentions two options of mapping existing roads in renovation:
Option 1: Already existing features may be closed for a short time for a temporary construction. For short-term closures consider using conditional restrictions. Example:
motor_vehicle:conditional=no @ 2024 May 22-2024 Oct 7 = Section of road is closed for motor vehicles (motor_vehicle=*) for a few months (for construction).
Option 2: Suppose there is a road highway=tertiary that has been closed for a longer period of time due to repair or reconstruction. It is then necessary to:
These two options are also reflected in the field. They are clearly used interchangeably.
We are now receiving more and more requests from data users to choose one of the two options.
Could you indicate your preferred option in your response?
I would like to add that in Belgium, we use a minimum period of approximately three months to map roads undergoing construction or temporary situations.
Furthermore, in this extremely detailed manual (p. 76), heavy mapper “bxl-forever” chooses to use option 1:
”There is still a gray zone for objects that are temporarily unavailable, e.g. roads closed to
traffic while they are undergoing repair works. Adding landuse=construction areas around
them and/or access:conditional values is usually a better solution than using lifecycle prefixes
or than changing the road type (do not use highway=construction for an existing road).”
1/ for short works = in the order of a weekend or a week don’t tag, as Waze has several very active ‘on the ball’ spotters in this area, they do an excellent job of marking roads closed for works and tend to open them soon after completion;
2/ for works which take longer (often posted as ‘four to six months’, but in practice overrunning) and will result in a vastly different layout prefer to use the wiki’s highway=construction tag as this gives a visual clue where to re-survey the new situation; (check Waze to see whether road re-opened)
3/ for works which take longer than just a few weeks but will eventually result in a largely similar layout add some visible blocks on ways concerned;
if there’s a reliable estimate of duration then by all means use the conditional time restriction on those blocks, but experience here in town shows that works will overrun, just not known by how long: a conditional restriction will then reopen a way which in practice can remain closed for several more months.
The way to which you added a changeset comment falls in the second group, two carriageways will be consolidated into one on the track of the former northbound ways the other carriageway converted to a green space with surface water infiltration.
Red-white ‘construction’ ways alert mappers this way needs a resurvey rather than a visit to ascertain that works are complete and connections as before.
Hope this clarifies? Yes, things may go according to plan elsewhere, here there are just too many works with a limited number of workers.
The question seems to be poorly phrased by datauser:
Regardless of whether option 1 or 2 is chosen for a country, there will be countries with option 1 and others with option 2. Consequently, data users must manage both.
So I will answer regardless of their request:
Option 1 has the advantage of managing itself at the end of the period. But it has the disadvantage of being used by almost no tools. Therefore, for the moment, it is more of a piece of information between contributors than a piece of information that is used.
Option 2 has the advantage of being used by all routing tools. It is the one I usually choose. add opening_date to allow QA tools to warn
Option 1 is nice in theory, and will sound great at the planning office, but needs a dependable timeframe once things get on site.
The wiki suggests conditional timeslots for a weekend or a week at most.
Then there is the after care: roadworks here involve more than re-cobbling setts, there’ll be EV-charging, changed parking, WADI-type infiltration areas, benches and bicycle stands.
As a cyclist I’d like to see those included, a road (in Antwerp) is evolving to be much more than just a way to quickly get your motorcar from there to here.
When an existing road is changed into highway=construction, OSM Inspector flags bus relations using it as invalid, because a bus route may never use non-existing roads. Solving this requires remapping bus routes along the temporary itinerary, which loses information about the normal shape of the line. Moreover, when the roadworks are complete, people who restore the normal highway type will rarely think about restoring bus relations that once were here (and how could they know where to find them?), resulting in incoherent map data.
I had a similar problem with streets marked with construction=yes where lengthy roadworks made them unusable. I came to the conclusion that it needs “access=no” for them to be excluded by the OSM routing engines (for that to take effect in all 3, it takes another week).