I credit OSM Carto with getting me hooked on mapping bridge areas in the first place. Until you made that change, I had been content to tag bridge names as name=* on the roadway and didn’t care much for bridge:name=*. After mappers in another city converted their river crossings to areas, seeing the result in Carto prompted me to do the same. As I systematically mapped bridge areas near me, I learned much more about road bridges than I would’ve ever known otherwise. This forced me to revisit my earlier mapping, where I had:
- Incorrectly begun
bridge=yesat the locations of expansion joints instead of the locations of bridge abutments, which are more difficult to spot in aerial imagery - Never noticed the regional road bridge naming scheme, which is important for pedestrian wayfinding
- Mistaken many bridges for overpasses over culverts
- Simply never noticed a bunch of bridges
The bridge fills in Carto are far from ideal, but I want to believe that they’ve had a positive effect on OSM. Besides, they’ve had a pedagogical effect, which is always something to celebrate.
Even though CoMaps shows that roadway fills are similarly difficult to get right, I think it’s in our community’s best interest to forge ahead with area:highway=* mapping anyways. A certain portion of the community is standing ready to pour time and effort into it, if only they can get enough instant gratification. Better to give them something imperfect now than wait until the distant future after they’ve moved on.