OptimoRoute Organised Editing Activity in the United States

Dear OSM Community,

We’d like to inform you that OptimoRoute is conducting an organized editing activity starting in early November, focused on improving the accuracy of road and path data across various regions in the United States. Our primary focus will be on editing existing ways to add constraint tags such as maxheight, maxweight:hgv, and similar tags.

To provide an example of our work, here is a link to a changeset from Albuquerque as part of our preparation for the organized activity.

You can find more information about our project, including objectives, data sources, and editing techniques, on our Organised Editing page.

We welcome your feedback or any questions you may have. Feel free to contact us at osm@optimoroute.com.

Thank you,

The OptimoRoute Team

From your wiki page:

Changesets are expected to be uploaded on a daily basis to keep the edit volume low per changeset.

I would recommend much more frequent uploads than daily. This reduces the change of conflicts.

Regarding paths, are you just changing tags, or are you modifying geometry as well? Many paths have been aligned to the Strava Global Heatmap, which is generally more accurate than imagery. The USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) data is also a good source for path location if the path has been worn into the ground. Regarding tagging, what are you using for sources (I presume you are not doing on-the-ground surveys)?

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Mike, thank you for your feedback and questions!

Regarding the changeset frequency, you make a good point. We will adjust to more frequent changeset uploads to further reduce the risk of conflicts. Each team member will be working up to a few hours daily, which will naturally keep the changesets smaller. This should help ensure smoother integration with ongoing community edits.

As for paths, we are primarily focusing on updating tags rather than modifying the geometry. Our work will involve adding constraint tags such as maxheight, maxweight:hgv, hgv=no, and similar tags—this is our main objective. We are aware of the alignment of many paths to the Strava Global Heatmap, and we have no plans to alter those geometries.

For tagging, we will be using publicly available government-issued maps and datasets as a reference, as outlined in our Organised Editing page. We are not conducting on-the-ground surveys, but imagery like Bing Streetside will be used for verification. We appreciate the suggestion about the USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) and will consider incorporating it into our process for areas where it might add value.

Thanks again for your input, and feel free to reach out if you have any further questions or suggestions!

Smaller changeset are also easier to revert if something goes wrong or needs a roll back.

PHerison, thank you for the additional comment.

Our team will be processing specific areas street by street. Streets will be selected based on research into missing tags compared to government-issued maps. Once a street’s way segments needing edits are verified, theoretically, we could create a changeset after each street is processed.

However, we are considering whether posting dozens of changesets per day by a single member might create an overwhelming volume, which could make the overall editing activity less trackable. We are aiming to strike a balance between frequent changesets for easier rollbacks and ensuring that the editing activity remains organized and manageable.

We appreciate your thoughts and would welcome any further input on how to manage this effectively!

Doing the same kind of change to a small cluster of streets is okay. For the type of work you’re doing, as long as you upload your changes before moving onto a new area or after spending 10+ minutes mapping the same area, your changesets will be manageable.

@clay_c, thank you for the feedback.

Indeed, norming the actual mapping of a smaller area to about 10+ minutes aligns with our conclusions from the preparation work for this organized activity. The parallel tasks of identifying targeted streets while investigating missing tags, and verifying street imagery for the beginning and end of restriction zones can, of course, add to the time spent on each area. The total time depends on factors such as the number of missing tags and the quality of street imagery.

We are open to instructing the team to save changesets for each small area. Would there also be a recommended number of ways in a changeset for a small area, as a rough rule of thumb?

Are you focusing on a particular region of the country or editing everywhere in the U.S.? The MUTCD wiki pages document expected tagging for a number of truck-related signs, but many states have their own truck-related signs that we haven’t documented yet. If you come across any sign that’s unlisted or has a :question: by it in the wiki’s MUTCD tables, either based on street-level imagery or the documents you’re consulting, please feel free to ask in United States so we can discuss the correct tagging for it.

@Minh_Nguyen, thank you for your question.

We will be editing across the U.S., and later expanding to other countries. For example, our team plans to simultaneously start with areas of and around Phoenix (AZ), Jacksonville (FL), and Indianapolis (IN). We’ll move to different areas depending on the severity of missing tags and our business priorities.

We are aware of the MUTCD wiki pages, particularly the Series R section. For instance, we are fully aware that the U.S. is the only country of our interest using short tons as the default unit, which differs from the default unit for OSM tags.

If we come across any signs that are unclear, we’ll be sure to ask the community for guidance.

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As a follow-up to the points discussed here, we have updated our Organised Editing page to include:

  • A more specific explanation of the scope and type of changes to be done
  • Changeset policy for more frequent saves, focusing on clusters of streets within small areas
  • Expanded details of internal review process, including the use of OSMCha tool