Project Missing Roads

[evgeniyakarnaukhova]

Introduction

The Missing Roads project will be focused on the addition of the new and missing roads to improve the overall road network connectivity and visualization. Places with missing roads will be automatically identified by the internal tools built by Mapbox developers based on GPS traces.
Example:

Types of Activity

Here is list of features we will be commonly focus on:

• Missing roads
• Roads geometry
• Oneway tag
• Surface tag (paved, unpaved)*
• Access tag*
  *We’re aware of local mapping and conditions. If there is a possibility that the road could have a special access tag and in case there is no ground truth we will leave a note or mark the access as unknown. Also we will add surface tag at least for roads outside of cities.

Geographical scope and timeframe

Missing Roads project will map on OSM worldwide. Right now main focus will be on:

• USA
• Canada
• Australia
• New Zealand

How to find Missing Roads edits

All edits made by our team in this project will have the hashtag #mapbox_missing_roads

Editing Team

All members of the team went through the onboarding process before starting editing on OpenStreetMap and are familiar with the principles of editing. The team will use OSM ID as the main tool for editing.
New editors are guided to OSM training resources like the OSM Wiki and iD editor's Help panel.
All team members can be found here: link

Documentation used for mapping:

1. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Way
2. Tags:
   2.1 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tags
   2.2 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway
   2.3 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/2021_Highway_Classification_Guidance
   2.4 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:oneway
   2.5 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:access
   2.6 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:surface

Sources

1. All available sources on OpenStreetMap site itself:
   1.1 Backgrounds or Satellite imagery (the latest ones based on dates in the Background panel info). Example:
   
   1.2 Photo Overlays or Street-level sources (Mapilary, Bing Streetside etc.)
   1.3 Overlays (OSM GPS traces, Tiger Roads etc.)
2. Sources with ODbL license
3. Mapbox datasets and tools**

**For cases where there is not enough ground truth data from the OSM (Backgrounds, Overlays, etc) we will use collected Mapbox telemetry data, GPS traces, knowledge of the on the ground test drivers, etc. to produce the edit. We are ready to share all sources that we will use for mapping in case and provide as much context as needed.

Results

The results of our review made by our team in OpenStreetMap will be provided quarterly in the /mapping repository in the comment section of the Project’s ticket.
In the USA there are at least 3,000 cases of missing roads by the end of May '2024.

Contact

We welcome feedback from OSM mappers as local knowledge always prevails. If you have any questions about a specific edit done by the Mapbox team inside this project or want to suggest some improvements in the editing process you can contact project coordinator yauheniya.karnaukhava@mapbox.com (Evgeniya) or post a comment in a changeset.

In cases of the general Mapbox mapping activity feedback and suggestions, please, use general contact e-mail: osm-edit-escalations@mapbox.com.

More information about team : Wiki page

[evgeniyakarnaukhova]

We’ve made 2250 changesets, created about 20,4K ways (2,4K km).
We spent most of our time adding service roads and parking aisles, residential roads and driveways. We also fixed old roads from TIGER uploads.
Right now the project is on pause, but we will use the hashtag if we will find a place to map again.
Examples:

before	after	links
		osm/37.84648/-81.19682
		osm/37.6993/-81.1071
		osm/map=16/47.4268/-111.3710

[evgeniyakarnaukhova]

Missing Roads project will map on OSM worldwide. Right now main focus will be on:

• USA
• Canada
• Australia
• New Zealand

[ValeriaYukovich]

As we plan to scale the Missing Roads project worldwide, we plan to map in Europe too. Apart from USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand mentioned above, we plan to start mapping on OSM in the following European countries:

• Germany
• France
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Italy
• Spain
• Sweden
• Denmark
• Norway
• United Kingdom

[SomeoneElseOSM]

With regard to the United Kingdom, I suspect that the local community would be interested to hear about these "missing roads" of which you speak. We've had Amazon mappers adding every bit of concrete that they can find. There are new builds of course, but I'd suggest raising all these edits with the local communities in the forum so that people can understand what mechanism you're using for detecting these and can help with tagging etc.

[ValeriaYukovich]

Hello, @SomeoneElseOSM! We are currently making official announcements to the OSM communities of the European countries mentioned above where we're planning to scale the project. Here is the announcement link: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/mapbox-organized-editing-missing-roads-in-the-uk/125552 with the more details we've made for the UK OSM community.