because I noticed that iD is sometimes incorrectly converting the old to the new street parking scheme, and after seeing some not-so-good MapRoulette challenges for converting the data, I want to make a new start and try to mitigate the damage as best as possible by resurrecting my MapRoulette StreetParking Converter Challenge.
I have developed a MapRoulette Challenge that converts the old to the new scheme semi-automatically. Sometimes, the conversion can be done automatically. In that case, you just have to check that the conversion is okay and click “Yes” if it is. But sometimes there are tags that cannot be automatically converted, thus you have to convert the tags by hand.
See here for how the instruction section can look:
As per the organized/automated guidelines that apply to MapRoulette challenges, I would like your feedback on the challenge before making it publicly available.
The challenge can be found here (for now only via this link). The generator code can be found here.
I would make the challenge publicly available on May 9th 2025 (This date will always be two weeks after the last change is made) if there are no (more) concerns.
In this case the no_parking tag dates back to 2011 and wasn’t updated when the street was redesigned with bike lanes and marked parking areas (even though the cycleway tags were added and lanes updated).
Would you add instructions to check aerial imagery/imageries for changes? Or would that be too many instructions and cause mappers to glaze over? Is it possible to detect age of the parking tag and add the imagery instruction only when it’s older than 5 years or so? Or is your goal only to convert the tags?
I have to say, my intention was just to convert the tags. I could of course add functionality to only task on recent data, but I think that defeats the point of a tag-conversion. And I have to say, not only in the case of street parking, but all tag conversions iD is doing, it’s doing them regardless of when that object was last touched. It’s just “assuming that this data is still correct, it should be tagged like this”. But I am happy to hear counter arguments to that.
One counter argument I’ve seen cited is that it makes it harder to identify tags that are several years old and thus might be out of date. But personally I don’t feel super strongly about this because evidently in this case having this old tag hasn’t helped with getting it fixed for the ~8 years it’s been out of date already.
(I’m going to update the particular street linked)
Yes, if you’re able to script a more accurate tag upgrade than what iD is able to recommend, then I think a MapRoulette challenge would be beneficial.
I don’t think a way’s age is a good measure of the freshness of street parking tags anyways, since a typical urban roadway has so many other tags on it that might have churned since. If anything, the presence of tags predating both of the street parking tagging overhauls from 2022 would be a decent signal that no one has tended to the parking tags yet.
That said, please file an issue against iD or id-tagging-schema with examples of incorrect upgrades you think iD has prompted mappers to make. It’ll be important to address any mistagging at the source too.
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