Mapbox Organized Editing, Missing Roads

Communities United States
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Hello from the Mapbox Team!

We’re going to start a new project Missing Roads.

The Missing Roads project will be focused on the addition of the new and missing roads to improve the overall road network connectivity and visualization. Places with missing roads will be automatically identified by the internal tools built by Mapbox developers based on GPS traces.

Here is list of features we will be commonly focus on:

  • Missing roads
  • Roads geometry
  • Surface tag (paved, unpaved)
  • Access tag*

*We’re aware of local mapping and conditions. If there is a possibility that the road could have a special access tag and in case there is no ground truth we will leave a note or mark the access as unknown.

The task will be mainly focused in the USA for the next couple of months and will include addition of the missing roads across all states. The predicted amount for now is 3000 missing roads.

We will use a unique hashtag - #mapbox_missing_roads

For edits we will use all available sources on OpenStreetMap site itself, sources with ODbL license, Mapbox datasets and tools**.

**For cases where there is not enough ground truth data from the OSM (Backgrounds, Overlays, etc) we will use collected Mapbox telemetry data, GPS traces, knowledge of the on the ground test drivers, etc. to produce the edit. We are ready to share all sources that we will use for mapping in case and provide as much context as needed.

More details:

  1. Link to the Github ticket.
  2. List of data team members.
  3. Link to our Wiki page.

We will be able to answer all the questions that arise right under this announcement.

You can also reach out to the project coordinator directly at yauheniya.karnaukhava@mapbox.com(Evgeniya) and osm-edit-escalations@mapbox.com or post a comment in a changeset.

We’ll share the results after finishing the first iteration in the GitHub ticket.

Also, in case of project scaling the future results will be provided quarterly in the /mapping repository in the comment section of the Project’s ticket.

Have a nice day everyone! Feel free to ask any question.

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If you’re adding unpaved roads outside cities, please make sure you add surface tags, even if just as broad-brush as surface=paved or surface=unpaved.

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We will take into account. Thank you for your comment.

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Thanks for the details you’ve provided. The GitHub issue links to the documentation for highway=*, which is written generically for a global audience. Since you’re editing in the U.S., you may need to consult the U.S. classification guidance as well. It won’t matter as much for driveways, like the one you gave as an example, but the regional guidance will be useful if you encounter anything more major.

Do you plan to indicate one-way streets at the same time as part of mapbox_roads_attributes? In the past, some mapping teams have tried to detect one-way streets based on telemetry data, but it can be quite unreliable unless there’s a very high volume of traces along the street.

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Hi, @Minh_Nguyen! You’re totally right. Will update the links and introduce team.
Btw I forgot to mention oneway tag in this project, my fault. We will make oneway edits in terms also of this project for new roads so we will use #mapbox_missing_roads. And we will use all ground truth sources and not only telemetry.
We will announce the Road attributes project separately, and it will focus more on road attributes, so the hashtag and task there is different, although there are similar objects to be mapping.
Thank you for your recommendations!

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UPD

Types of Activity

Here is list of features we will be commonly focus on:

  • Missing roads
  • Roads geometry
  • Oneway tag
  • Surface tag
  • Access tag

Documentation used for mapping:

  1. Way - OpenStreetMap Wiki
  2. Tags:
    2.1 Tags - OpenStreetMap Wiki
    2.2 United States/2021 Highway Classification Guidance - OpenStreetMap Wiki
    2.3 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:oneway
    2.4 Key:access - OpenStreetMap Wiki
    2.5 Key:surface - OpenStreetMap Wiki