Why are there so many points on roads that are aligned with driveways? It’s as if there was once a line for a driveway connected there, but it was removed. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but it seems too common to be that. Are they the result of some past edits that were mass removed?
For example, this point, which is in the middle of a long section of straight road and could have been anywhere, but ended up here:
Is there something in the data when the roads were imported that includes a node where a driveway should connect? Driveways aren’t something that the government data would include but the survey would include where the driveway is as part of the parcel / property boundary info. That’s my educated guess as to where these nodes come from.
If there wasn’t a now-deleted driveway there, it may simply be that the original mapper chose those as convenient places to put nodes for alignment. I’ve done that before.
can you link OSM nodes? history can be inspected for them
not sure has it happened here but when I map roads I tend to put nodes where other more minor features like driveways will be connected to, even if I am not mapping them right now
it could be someone removed many driveways, but not necessarily, for example when I draw new roads, I try to put the nodes on the driveway intersections, even if for now I will not draw all the driveways, because I know sooner or later there will be a drawn driveway there.
When I come along a misaligned road in the U.S. (mostly in rural areas) I try to move way-nodes at junctions to later reuse the node for adding driveway or tracks.
Here is the location of nodes where OP was talking about OpenStreetMap . They have since added driveways, but I’m curious how would you go about finding the history?
Here is history of one of the nodes, but would that show if a driveway had been attached and then removed later if the node didn’t get moved at all? For example I don’t see the new driveway op added in the node history.
It means that when you do add the driveway later, the changeset won’t show modifications to the road way, as that way didn’t have any node additions, making the changeset cleaner. Particularly useful if it is a very long way.
Thanks @Mateusz_Konieczny yah used some overpass queries and found a commit that removed roads/driveways about 10 years ago. Driveway removed: way/19304990
So it looks like there was the original tiger import for the road (changeset/498237), then another tiger import shortly after that for the driveway (changeset/498039). Then later someone removed the driveways.
So yes, seems in the original tiger dataset, there were driveways that were later removed, that’s why those nodes line up with the driveways!
(PS. I really wish there was a better method for just finding all deleted features inside a small bounding box besides guessing and checking date ranges with overpass-turbo. I could only make queries comparing between two dates, so if something was create and removed between those dates it would not show up it seems)
Sorry, I realized after I posted that I should have done that, but I haven’t had time to reply until now (sleep + work). I had just seen it so many times that it finally got to me and I decided to just quickly post something. Guess it’s a moot point now.
I had that thought too, but in a second case of me not providing enough detail, I should have mentioned that it’s something I’ve seen in a wide variety of places (or at least across all of Ohio). It seemed to be too widespread to be just a single person or a few people.
At least this answers my question of whether people actually do this.
For reference, the changeset where I added the missing driveways is 177162930.
By the way, I was impressed with your ability reverse search the images I posted to find the exact area until I realized you probably just went back through my edit history.
Excellent detective work figuring that out. Good to know my sanity is still intact! (Or at least I eliminated one piece of evidence it isn’t…)
When I trace a new way on a road I purposely choose the joins of streets so that it can easily be connected later if someone were to add a new connected way/street there.
I’ve seen this done (and occasionally done it myself when speed mapping) as a way to highlight locations to tee-off from later, as the centerline of the driveway and the centerline of the road usually make a good visual point of reference.
I’m not so sure about that! Many places do keep track of driveways for various purposes. Fire safety and building safety codes immediately come to mind because a long driveway that can’t support fire apparatus is a potential mortal hazard. In urban contexts, curb cuts and which ones are actually authorized in the first place, is also a factor for pedestrian and bicycle traffic safety.
Whether or not it’s a publicly accessible record and the difficulty in getting that information is another story entirely. Places that rely on volunteer firefighters are generally more inclined to semi-publicly produce records like elevation plans and/or building plans for improvements to a property as almost anyone from the general public can become a volunteer firefighter and might need this information.
