Hello! my name is Andrei, I work in Mapbox Data team. My team is interested in doing some work on the road network in Thailand on OpenStreetMap, things like adding missing roads, making sure roads connect properly, fixing incorrect alignments, fixing spam and incorrect name, ensuring road classifications are consistent, and other similar issues.
We welcome feedback from local mappers as local knowledge always prevails. If you have any questions about a specific edit done by the Mapbox team or want to suggest some improvements in the editing process, you can contact here, email: osm-edit-escalations@mapbox.com,
post a comment in a changeset or post a comment on GitHub project.
Thank you for reaching out to the Thailand OSM community and letting us know about your upcoming campaign! It’s great to hear that Mapbox is planning to contribute here.
For street names and road classifications, there are specific guidelines tailored for Thailand that you might find helpful: WikiProject Thailand.
Adding and Improving Street Names
Will you primarily be using ground-level imagery for this task, or do you have other data sources in mind? Just a heads-up, companies like Grab have already done significant work in this area, so it’s worth double-checking to ensure your changes don’t inadvertently conflict with existing contributions.
Creating New Roads Based on Aerial Imagery
A quick note of caution: available aerial imagery in Thailand is typically 3–5 years old and may not reflect the current ground situation. This is especially true in rural or remote areas, where tracks might no longer exist, or in urban areas where visible roads might be too narrow or forbidden for cars, or even separated by concrete walls due to new developments.
Past campaigns by other organizations (like Facebook and Grab) have had issues with classification guesswork, leading to data conflicts that still persist today.
If you’re adding roads purely based on imagery (e.g., Bing, ESRI, Mapbox), I’d strongly recommend tagging them as highway=road. This leaves room for local mappers, who have better ground knowledge, to refine and classify them more accurately later.
On a related note, Mapbox is one of the few map providers that doesn’t render highway=road with a distinct style, which can make things tricky. I’d love to take this opportunity to flag this as a potential improvement: Mapbox GitHub issue.
@julcnx
Thanks for the helpful clarification and the links provided.
We will mostly be correcting errors, since we have some database of features that potentially have problems (dragged node, spam name & etc.), we plan to upload these features to Maproulette and fix them there.
Regarding highway=road - we will forward the information to the appropriate team, thank you