Hi:
Last month I’ve been mountain-biking on a private estate in South Africa. There are almost no roads plotted on OpenStreetMap for that area. I’ve uploaded 2 GPX tracks onto OSM and converted the traces into service roads.
Can you review my work and provide me any feedback? If my additions are correctly done, I can import my other GPX tracks.
Regards
Ivan
Ivan, I looked over your edits. Looks great overall! In general, the suggestion I have for you is to increase the detail in geometry of the roads you added. I recommend against directly converting GPS recordings into OSM features. In most cases, some manual cleanup is required to get a gpx file up to par.
Regarding service road vs path classification, the line is somewhat blurry, but you should consider things like typical vehicle vs pedestrian use, ownership, purpose, and surface maintenance (or lack thereof). Let me know here or in a DM if you have any other questions. Thanks for your contributions!
Thank you for your response. I used the GPS recordings as an initial reference, but the OSM roads are derived from satellite imagery. I’ll proceed with adding the remaining GPS recordings in the same manner.
Hi Ivan,
I’ll just suggest you to limit the number of points for ways, GPS recording contain a lot of noise, so don’t hesitate the only use two points when this roughly looks a straight line, this will save you a lot of time and most of the time, this will look nicer on maps.
If you use JOSM to import those GPX files, there a very useful “Simplify” tool to greatly reduce the number of points.
Also, “surface” and “smoothness” keys are often appreciated to plan some biking trip, even if in theses changesets, since this a private property, it won’t be much useful for other users but you may want add public ways.