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.
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)?
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
I applaud the work here, thank you. Restrictions could use some love if OSM is to be a world class routing data platform and many of these restrictions are difficult to find or even interpret for casual mappers. I conducted a small project to bring in Baltimore County’s bridge restrictions into OSM via MapRoulette that I would encourage you to emulate. Counties and local governments sometimes have this information in a database, though it may not be readily published. I asked for it in this case and got a copy, then ETL’d into OSM data.
One challenge I had in that project was that some mappers did not agree with small culverts being converted to small bridges. However, there is no other way that I know of to put a maxweight on a small bridge deck.
For what it’s worth, any stretch of road can have a weight restriction; it doesn’t have to be a bridge. In the Midwest, many roads have (conditional) truck weight restrictions nowhere near bridges, due to thawing season.
That said, I agree with retagging culverts to bridges based on how they’re actually constructed, sometimes despite how they look in aerial imagery.
Seems like a bit of a hack. What if the highway department adds weight restrictions to a bunch of culverts that didn’t have them before, are we going to remap them as bridges? They should be mapped based on their physical design and if we need to have weight restrictions we should figure out how to do that. I like @Minh_Nguyen 's suggestion of putting the restriction on the road over the culvert.
I would remap them as bridges, yes, that is no hack. A bridge is a physical property that is observable (a key tenet for OSM). The weight restriction is often just for that very short section.
The bridge tag is easy to see and associate with the restriction, whereas a roadway level restriction may be less obvious. In my experience, roadway attribution tags tend to be merged by unscrupulous mappers that are unaware of their being there, such as with lane tagging around intersections. This is of course not an excuse, however it is harder to justify merging a bridge with a road as an accident.
I have the same debate internally with bridge overpasses that have a height restriction. Do you add the restriction to the entire road where no through traffic is possible? or just the short area under the bridge? For the purposes of delivery, a truck operator might want to know how they could access a single driveway along that stretch prior to the restriction.
In any case, the great bridge vs culvert debate is subjective. There is no right answer. But if the government calls it a bridge, and it has bridge-like properties, I would say it is fine to call it a bridge in OSM.
I’d just put height restriction on the road, that’s the function expected by truck drivers - not to drive on that road. But thing being OSM, we can’t escape the debate ’ acshually… technically’
If it is a culvert it is a culvert whether or not it has a weight restriction. To map a culvert as a bridge just because it has a weight restriction is a hack.
Just the bit under the bridge, and the weight restriction should be applied just to the bit over the culvert
I am sure there are some standards we could consult as we craft our definition for OSM, so not entirely subjective.
If that is the case let’s fix that problem rather than mapping around it.
What’s the suggestion for avoiding unscrupulous merging of lanes? I suppose you could always tag the surrounding ways with maxweight=none if overzealous merging is a major concern. You could also map the weight restriction signs themselves so it’s easier to detect and resolve any discrepancy.
The great bridge versus culvert debate should probably be a separate thread. I don’t see anything that would be specific to OptimoRoute. The last time we discussed this on the forum, it was buried in a thread about a different mapping team’s bridge weight restriction project.
I had hoped to settle the debate with The Big Fill along California State Route 152: yes, there is a 9-foot-tall (3.7 m) concrete arch, but above that is a 270-foot-tall (82 m) fill, so it makes a lot more sense to depart from the official Caltrans bridge inventory and model it as a surface road over a pipeline culvert.
Fortunately, this particular fill has no bridge weight restriction – not even close. But I could see a much smaller fill over a culvert having a weight restriction for the same reason that a bridge or a surface road subject to frost laws would have one: to avoid crushing something fragile underneath.
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 
I suppose you could always tag the surrounding ways with 