Re: [Talk-us] [Tagging] Trunk VS primary

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Mateusz Konieczny 
> 21 Dec 2019, 12:00 by wolfg...@lyxys.ka.sub.org:
>> I suggest to keep the road classification consistent at least within
>> a country and try to solve the problem of roads in low-zoom maps at
>> the rendering level, by modifying the list of displayed road classes
>> until a target density of displayed roads is reached. That might
>> become easier to do when we move to vector tiles.

> Seems not doable with OSM data - this
> would require far more road classes
> than we use.

Why would we need more road classes for that? This would only be an
issue if the difference between two "adjacent" classes would be so big
that you would jump from "almost none" to "to many to display" in one
step.

> lane and surface data is also almost
> certainly not helpful here even with full
> coverage

> And it would result in weird transitions
> between countries.

Only if road density changes rapidly at the border, and then we would
just depict the weird transition that exists in reality.

I think it might be possible to upgrade the "minimum zoom level to
display" on a way if there are no already displayed ways in an area,
maybe only if it connects to an already displayed way (recursive).
That way we would boost the minimum zoom level of e.g.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/196509120 to zoom-level 11 or maybe
even 9, even with it being just a low quality dirt track going near an
obscure archaeological site in the middle of nowhere.

Wolfgang
( lyx@osm )

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Re: [Talk-us] [Tagging] Trunk VS primary

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Joseph Eisenberg  wrote:
> Above it was said that the highway=trunk vs highway=primary
> distinction is mostly for routing applications. But allowing a proper
> rendering is also a main goal of the road tagging system.

> While it's true that road class is useful for routing when there are
> two alterate routes, a main reason to tag highways with a certain
> class is to be able to render maps properly at different zoom levels.

> When you are making a high-scale, low-zoom-level map of a large area
> (say, the whole State of Alaska, all of England, or all of Australia),
> you will want to only render highway=motorway + highway=trunk, because
> showing all highway=primary would lead to rendering many smaller roads
> which are not reasonable to show at that scale in most places.

> [..]

What makes the problem of road classification so hard is that we want it
to do different things at once. For rendering we have on the one hand
the requirement that we want to show all the "relevant" roads for a
given zoom level, on the other hand, as a map user I would expect that
a road shown as e.g. trunk in Massachusets would be quite similar in
characteristics to a road shown as trunk in Montana.

I suggest to keep the road classification consistent at least within
a country and try to solve the problem of roads in low-zoom maps at
the rendering level, by modifying the list of displayed road classes
until a target density of displayed roads is reached. That might
become easier to do when we move to vector tiles.

Wolfgang
( lyx@osm )

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Re: [Talk-us] Opinions on micro parks

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

I guess we have (as so often) a problem with unconscious cultural bias
here. Property rights in Europe are generally much more limited than in
the US, e.g. in all but one(?) German states all forests are by law public
access, regardless of ownership. Also open farmland, meadows, etc.,
anything that is not fenced or walled in or immediately around houses
can normally be assumed to be public access in much of Europe, and the few
exceptions would be clearly signposted. I guess most european mappers
are not aware that the situation is different in other parts of the
world, so they simply have no idea why it could be necessary to tag a
piece of forest as a "park" to show it is a public access space.

Wolfgang
( lyx @ osm )

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Re: [Talk-us] Historic 66 as highway=trunk in OK

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Paul Johnson  [190829 14:09]:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 6:40 AM Joseph Eisenberg 
> wrote:

>> That's probably not relevant for anywhere in the USA (even in Alaska
>> the main highways between cities are paved... right?) but it's a
>> reminder that we can certainly choose to do things in a way that makes
>> sense for mapping the USA; we don't have to use the British or German
>> standards.

> The larger cities in southern Alaska.  Most are gravel, including a paper
> interstate.  I think Alaska's the last state to still have gravel state
> highways.

Many (if not most) of Montanas "Secondary State Highways" are gravel.

Wolfgang
( lyx @ OSM )

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Re: [Talk-us] Someone from Boston, MA?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Thanks, this was quite helpful.

* Bill Ricker  [190430 05:47]:
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 11:12 PM Kevin Kenny  wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 11:01 PM Kevin Kenny  wrote:
>>> I'm not a Bostonian, but I've been to Copley Place.
>>> Copley Place is a named building: 
>>> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/240501783

> This local Bostonian concurs.

> This is one of those skyscrapers with a vanity "street" address with
> no such street.
> (To confuse matters further, there is also a Copley Place Hotel whose
> address is NOT Copley Place!)

Apparently there are even two such hotels.

>> more information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copley_Place - the
>> building complex, in addition to the shopping mall, has office
>> buildings (tenants include the German and Canadian consulates, on the
>> fourth and fifth floors respectively of tower 3), hotels and a parking
>> garage, all connected.

> (and all-weather connections to adjacent malls and hotels too, and to
> two T (metro) lines and Amtrak rail.)
> (used to have a Cinema, but iirc it got consolidated out of existence?)

>> I'm not familiar enough with indoor mapping to be able to direct you
>> how to map a suite within the towers.

> A Consulate might prefer we not map the interior access?
> That level of detail is fine for retail but ... government entities
> can attract untoward attention.

I have no clue of indoor mapping myself, so I just placed two nodes in
what I estimated to be the rough location of tower 3 and tagged them as
the Canadian and German consulates.

Greetings,
Wolfgang
( lyx @ osm )

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[Talk-us] Someone from Boston, MA?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

I tried to add the German Consulate General in Boston, MA, but could not
find the address "Three Copley Place, Boston, MA 02116" in
our data. That place is apparently somewhere near Boston University.
Anyone local who could check if this is a missing street name in our
data?

consulate website: https://www.germany.info/us-en/embassy-consulates/boston

Greetings,
Wolfgang
( lyx @ osm )

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[Talk-us] Open Data track at SCaLE 17x

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

I just noticed that the Southern California Linux Expo 2019 in Pasadena
will have an "Open Data" track. That looks like a good opportunity to
raise awareness about OpenStreetMap, so if someone would like to do a
presentation, the CfP is at https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/17x/cfp

Greetings from Germany,
Wolfgang
( lyx @ osm )

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Re: [Talk-us] Drop the tiger:reviewed tag from roads

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Richard Welty  [180511 20:16]:
> On 5/11/18 2:00 PM, Doug Hembry wrote:
>> So I cast a vote for keeping it. At least don't mechanically remove them 
>> all, everywhere.

> i still use the reviewed tags for guidance as well, and would prefer
> that they
> stick around. i remove them when i've reviewed a road carefully (name,
> connectivity, location, classification, surface.)

same for me; loosing this tag would make it much harder for me to
keep track of the roads I have already reviewed/fixed and which ones are
still to do.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Satus CDP

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Clifford Snow  [180227 01:59]:
> In the middle of the Yakama Nation Indian Reservation sits Satus [1] that
> as far as I know only exists in some Census bureaucrat world. Asking around
> here I haven't found anyone familiar with the area. Wikipedia [2] doesn't
> help much either.

> I'd like to remove it from OSM. What reasonable checks do I need to do
> before deleting it. Or do they belong in OSM and I should leave it alone.

> I should add that the reason I want to delete it is because currently
> shares a boundary with the Yakama Nation. The boundary needs updating.

I would delete it, the boundary is useless. The name is still on the
place node next to what I guess used to be the railway station.

Wolfgang
(lyx @ osm)

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Re: [Talk-us] Low-quality NHD imports

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

* Charlotte Wolter  [171016 23:50]:
>  Clifford makes some very good points. In the West, particularly,
> those little intermittent streams are important landmarks. Particularly
> when hiking in a featureless area, such as pinyon-juniper forest, a
> trail direction may say something like, "turn right after crossing the third
> drainage."
> [..]

the problem here is that at least those NHD imports I have seen in
Montana have only some of the existing streams. I don't know if this is
because NHD does not have more or because the import used not all
available streams. "Existing streams" here means both streams seen on
USGS Topo maps and stream beds seen on imagery.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Trunk

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

it looks to me that this discussion is going in circles, not forward
at the moment. IMHO it does not make a lot of sense to argue what might
be the true meaning of "trunk". Instead, we should concentrate on what
it should mean, document this meaning if we can agree on one and don't
worry to much about what other maps or different parts of the world
think a "trunk" is.

The definition of "trunk" that I have used so far: A highway that is of
the same network importance as a primary, but specifically constructed
for fast traffic.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Low-quality NHD imports

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

* Frederik Ramm  [171013 08:06]:
>there's a LOT of NHD:* (and nhd:*) tags on OSM objects, see

> https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=NHD%3A

> - 1.9 million NHD:FCode, but also 188k "NHD:Permanent_" (note the
> underscore), 10k "NHD:WBAreaComI", or 1.5m "NHD:Resolution" just to grab
> a few.

> I haven't researched who added them and when, but they would certainly
> not clear the quality standards we have for imports today. Most of this
> information can be properly modelled in usual OSM tags, and where it
> cannot, it probably shouldn't be in OSM in the first place.

> Is there any systematic (or even sporadic) effort of cleaning up these
> old imports? Is there reason to believe that the neglect extends to more
> than just the tags - do geometry and topology usually work well on
> these, or are the funny tags a huge "this whole area hasn't had any love
> in a long time" sign?

the NHD imports that I have encountered so far have numerous problems:
The data is several decades old, the so-called "medium resolution" is
pretty bad, and the data was basically just dumped into the OSM database
without any conflation happening. And larger rivers where often imported
as monstrous riverbank polygons without the river itself as a flowline.

The worst junk like lakes covering motorways has been mostly cleaned up
by now, but it is still easy to see where NHD data has been imported by
looking a KeepRights display of broken highway/waterway crossings.

I clean up the imports in areas where I'm doing TIGER reviews, but I
have to admit that a few times I have decided to work on different areas
instead because the huge riverbank polygons where almost impossible to
edit.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] dubious church node

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Carl Anderson  [170930 17:21]:
> ​A little history on GNIS data, and the Board of Geographic Names.

> The US Board of Geographic Names manages names for places and features
> shown on US govt maps.  They have been using a database to manage the names
> across maps and map scales. That database is the GNIS.

> The ​original GNIS data was populated from all text labels shown on USGS
> maps.  The most common source was 1:24,000 scale topo quarter quads.  Text
> from 1:100,000, 1:250,000 and 1:1,000,000 scale maps and larger were
> included.

> The stated map accuracy of these scales  (
> https://nationalmap.gov/standards/nmas.html ) is approximately

> 1:24:00040 feet
> 1:250,000 416 feet
> 1:500,000 833 feet
> 1:1,000,000   1666 feet

> The GNIS dataset includes the most precise location for text, when the text
> appears on maps of different scales.

You can look at the full database entry for an individual GNIS feature
if you search for the GNIS Feature ID at geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=gnispq

This will give you the source of the database entry, possibly a list of
alternate names, sometimes a note like "location approximate", and
sometimes the history of the decision process if more than one name
had been proposed for the feature. Also documentation of official
name changes.

One more thing to know about GNIS: entries are never deleted. If a
feature no longer exists, the name gets "(historical)" appended to
it. This may have happened after the feature was imported to OSM,
so it may not show in the OSM database.

Unfortunately the GNIS database is no longer fully maintained due to
budget constraints, so you can't be sure if features still exist even
if they are not flagged as "(historical)".

As to mapping in OSM: I usually remove any "(historical)" feature.
For the others, I improve the location if possible, and if the feature
can be represented as an area, I draw that area/polygon.
Instead of deleting the original POI, I now reuse that node as part
of the outline of the feature and only move the tags to the area, so
someone looking at the object details can notice that one of the nodes
is a lot older than the others and still find the osm history of the
feature on that node.

Wolfgang
( lyx @ OSM )

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Re: [Talk-us] NJ mass road demotions?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Richard Fairhurst  [170612 20:55]:
> Kevin Kenny wrote:
>> Is there *anyone* that actually can speak to what *is* common 
>> practice in the US? When I've asked, I've always drawn a lot of 
>> replies and come away more confused than before.

> I've been doing vast amounts of rural TIGER fixup over the past couple of
> years and this is what broadly seems to be what I've seen, bearing in mind
> standard practice in other developed countries and the idea that the
> highway= tag combines the importance in the highway network with some
> assurance of construction quality:

> * highway=motorway: interstate or other long-distance restricted-access road
> * highway=trunk: fast, busy State Highway or US Highway, often NHS/STRAHNET
> * highway=primary: major State Highway or US Highway
> * highway=secondary: other State Highway or major County Road
> * highway=tertiary: other through route, often a County Road, usually paved
> with centreline
> * highway=unclassified: rural minor route, sometimes a County Road, paved
> unless tagged otherwise
> * highway=residential: minor public road intended for residential access
> rather than through route, paved unless tagged otherwise
>   (N.B. currently not safe to assume paved in rural areas where
> tiger:reviewed=no)
> * highway=track: ungraded or rough, but usable by some four-wheeled vehicles

> There are many, many variations, especially because the US doesn't have a
> single nationwide system like most European countries, but if I had to sum
> it up in a few words I'd choose the above.

While most places in the US commonly use some variation of the above,
not all places use the same variation (and that wouldn't make sense
either). Using a common tagging scheme is probably much easier on a
state by state level, so we should have wiki pages describing how
suggested tagging in one specific state is different than the one
described on the US road tagging guide. We have those pages for some
states; problem is that many "drive-by-mappers" don't bother to look at
them but use their one (undocumented) criteria. One example would be a
mapper who changed all highways in Montana connecting to a port of entry
and onward to a Canadian highway to primary. Many of these are unpaved
"Montana Secondary State Highways" which I converted back to tertiary,
as described on the Montana/Highways wiki page.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] No updates on zoom level 12?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Clifford Snow <cliff...@snowandsnow.us> [170404 16:33]:
> On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 1:52 AM, Wolfgang Zenker <wolfg...@lyxys.ka.sub.org>
> wrote:

>> is there a known problem with tile updates for zoom level 12?
>> That zoom level is not updating for the area around Harlowton MT for
>> about two months now, despite marking tiles dirty several times
>> in the last 8 weeks.

> I haven't heard of any issues - what is missing?

The road from US 191 to Springwater Colony is missing, and loads of
TIGER "residential roads" show up that have been fixed many weeks
ago and should be displayed as unclassified or not at all at this
level where they really are tracks.

Also some rivers are missing like American Fork.

Wolfgang
(lyx @ osm)

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[Talk-us] No updates on zoom level 12?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

is there a known problem with tile updates for zoom level 12?
That zoom level is not updating for the area around Harlowton MT for
about two months now, despite marking tiles dirty several times
in the last 8 weeks.

Wolfgang
(lyx @ osm)

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Re: [Talk-us] USGS Large-Scale Imagery degraded this month :(

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

* Russ Nelson  [161221 00:21]:
> Paul Johnson writes:
>> On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 1:59 PM, Ian Dees  wrote:
>>> I will try to contact a couple of the folks I know at USGS (maybe they're
>>> still on this list and could respond?), but it might be the case that we
>>> need to request the imagery and build the desired layer ourselves...

>> Sounds like a plan, if only to save this valuable service for posterity.
>> I'm sure those familiar with me at this point can go ahead and fill in
>> their own frustrated and politically fueled rant about my feelings on this
>> even being something we need to be talking about now...

> Does this service degradation apply to the USGS Topographic maps, too?
> I've noticed that they load slowly and sometimes not at all.

> I can put up some money, if that's what it takes.

According to
https://www.usgs.gov/news/usgs-national-map-orthoimagery-map-services-transition-and-other-map-service-changes
the Topo maps are going away completely.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Western TIGER Roads

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Alan Bragg  [160603 21:30]:
> [..]
> Is there any other resource? Maybe some links to well tagged areas.

I have almost finished reviewing the part of Stillwater County, MT
south of the Yellowstone River (residential roads in Absarokee are not
finished yet, and also a little bit of Reed Point).

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/45.5866/-109.3726 

So far I think my tagging there is ok (but of course I might be wrong:
when I come across areas that I worked on 5 years ago I usually find
quite some things that I do differently today; probably five years
from now that will happen in areas that I worked on now).

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* OSM Volunteer stevea  [160509 20:23]:
> This might sound glib, but I believe that setting landuse=forest on a 
> (multi)polygon which is land use forest is correct. [..]

I guess everyone would agree with that. The problem is that we (as in
"the mappers of OpenStreetMap") don't agree on what landuse=forest
actually means. As far as I remember we have one group that thinks
its an area set aside for growing and harvesting timber, so it can
be recognized by the presence of (planted) trees or the remains of
trees that have been recently harvested and will be replaced by newly
planted trees soon(-ish); and another group defining it as an area
where timber or small wood can be legally harvested or collected,
regardless of trees being actually or at least possibly present.
For forests using the second definition you would have to follow
official boundaries, which might be difficult to verify on the ground.

My personal preference would be to take up mapping areas covered by
trees as landcover=trees and rendering these areas the way that
landuse=forest is currently rendered, to map National Forests with
an administrative boundary and just rendering the boundary line and
deprecate landuse=forest altogether.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Old Aerodromes

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Andrew Wiseman  [160412 23:27]:
> [..]
> Or maybe there should be some tag difference between a proper airport with
> scheduled flights, a civil aviation airport, and just a field where a
> farmer might land?

Actually there is a tag, or rather there are two: The wiki page
for aeroway=aerodrome suggests to combine it with aerodrome:type=*
in the english version of the aerodrome page (used ~2000 times)
while the german version of that page suggests to use aerodrome=*
instead (used about 900 times).
Of course having two documented tags for the same purpose is not
exactly helpful which might be one of the reasons why more than
90% of mapped airports use neither one.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Old Aerodromes

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Paul Norman  [160412 17:27]:
> On 4/12/2016 2:40 AM, Christoph Hormann wrote:
>> On Tuesday 12 April 2016, Martijn van Exel wrote:
 I was mapping some rural area in the U.S. and noticed, not for the
 first time, an aerodrome node in the middle of a field where there is
 obviously no airport or airfield.

>> I am not sure here.  For small airfields the aeroway=aerodrome feature
>> is a fairly abstract thing essentially indicating only that this is a
>> place where aircrafts start or land.  This is not generally something
>> that can be reliably determined from imagery.

> You can't reliably find small airfields from imagery, but I've found it 
> possible to verify a lack of airfields from it. I pass though 
> agricultural areas, and the airfields that are still active all appear 
> somehow on imagery, even if it's just an area where the ground cover is 
> different. On the other hand, some of the aeroway=aerodrome we have data 
> for include points in fields of corn, residential areas, and stands of 
> trees.

One added problem here is that the coordinates of imported data are
not always that good. As an example check Zortman Airport
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1042048666
The original import was more than half a mile off.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Old Aerodromes

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

* Martijn van Exel  [160412 16:29]:
> Thanks for the feedback. I understand that the existence of an small airfield 
> can be hard to verify from imagery - [..]

one more thing to check: If the node was imported from GNIS, check the GNIS
website searching for the feature id. In some cases that I have seen the
GNIS entry had moved to "historical" status since the feature had been
imported. If a feature in GNIS has "(historical)" at the end of the name
field it means the feature does no longer exist, so we can delete it in OSM.

Wolfgang

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[Talk-us] Groups of lakes (was: Strategy for Naming Parts of a Large Park)

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Kevin Kenny  [160411 02:22]:
> [..]
> Will the same idea work with waterways?  There are a lot of places near 
> me where there's a collective name: "Preston Ponds", "Essex Chain of 
> Lakes" ...  with individual waterbodies having the unimaginative names 
> "Upper Pond," "Middle Pond," "Lower Pond" or "First Lake," "Second 
> Lake," ... "Eighth Lake".  The naming (and rendering) on those is kind 
> of messed up as well. These, too, tend to be strung out in a linear 
> formation since each chain is on a river.

I have started to tag these groups of lakes as a site relation.
One recent example would be https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6077541
The group is collectively known as "Hellroaring Lakes", with some
of the individual lakes having their own names and others being
unnamed. The drawback of this solution: the name of the site relation
is currently not rendered on the standard map, nor is it found by
nominatim. But I expect both to change eventually if this tagging
gets used more often.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Where to find airport information?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Clifford Snow  [160306 16:14]:
> The first example you provided is located in Stillwater County, Montana.
> Stillwater has gis data available, but unfortunately for me requires
> Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin which I am not able to run. I would
> check the county gis database for more information. The website is
> http://www.stillwater.mt.gov/GIS/default.asp

Silverlight is a no-go for me as well, I don't think it even exists
for my operating system.

> There is even someone you could contact. I find most county gis departments
> usually more than willing to help, especially if you ask nice. Even in
> counties without free data, they might be able to provide you with the name
> of the runway.

I will contact them as soon as I'm done with cleaning up TIGER geometries
in the area, because I have a few more questions (e.g. roads that look
a lot like residential roads, but with no name given on TIGER).
Thanks for the contact!

> Have you contacted the user? While it looks like a runway, I'm not certain
> that it is. Although, not sure what else it could be.

Well, the user would be myself in this case, and I added these things
as runways because that is what they look like.

> FWIW - I used to live in Montana and am familiar with parts of the state.

Great, so there are at least a few people in the project familiar
with Montana. I've been there only a few times as a tourist, and I
have been working on cleaning up TIGER geometries for Montana
basically because (almost) no-one else did. My hope is that we
find more mappers if one can start mapping without having to clean
up a lot of broken data first.

Wolfgang

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[Talk-us] Where to find airport information?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hello everyone,

I have recently come across a few runways in Montana that I could not
find any information about except the imagery. I tried to search for
these airfields on the FAA website, but without success (maybe I did
it wrong).
Any idea where to find out more?

Two examples would be here:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/45.4301/-109.8209=N
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/45.5226/-109.5370=N

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] OpenStreetMap US elections: October 12 townhall with candidates

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Steve Coast  [151014 17:21]:
> [..]
> A more interesting question is what should OSMFUS try to do to build editors 
> in the US, and what metric should we use (presumably active editor headcount)?

> What we’ve tried so far:
> [..]
> It feels like we should try some different things (ideas?) on a per-state 
> basis. For example, we run 100 mapping parties in Idaho and we engage 100 
> schools in Tennessee and so on so there’s distance between them and we can 
> really measure the effectiveness of anything.

> Some ideas to try:
> [..]

Thanks for steering this discussion in the direction of possible
improvements. To add a bit to Steves ideas:

I suggest to focus on the rural parts of the US instead of big cities
for a while. These are usually neglected by "the other map", looking
there shows better geometry then OSM but the same crappy, typo-infested
and incomplete TIGER based road names that we have, which tells me that
they never really looked at the area. And IMHO rural areas are where
you can win "hearts and minds" of the american people.

One idea would be to have a mapping party doing TIGER fixup for one
rural county, then contact the local newspaper, write an article what
has been done and ask for help regarding wrong/incomplete road names,
wrong data caused by outdated imagery, etc.
My guess would be that newspapers in rural towns would be happy about
every article regarding their local area that they can get.

What I noticed in many years of doing TIGER fixup in Montana is that
TIGER data in reservations is even worse than the already bad data in
other rural areas. Maybe organising mapping parties together with e.g.
a local mission inside a reservation, or working with the BIA?

Wolfgang

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[Talk-us] TIGER layer usage limit?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

currently I get error messages like

Skipping job 
http://c.tiles.mapbox.com/v4/enf.e0b8291e/17/26552/45850.png?access_token=pk.eyJ1Ijoib3BlbnN0cmVldG1hcCIsImEiOiJhNVlHd29ZIn0.ti6wATGDWOmCnCYen-Ip7Q
 because host limit reached

in JOSM while editing and trying to show the TIGER 2015 overlay.

Do I map to much? Or is this a global limit and the grand total of
people using this layer is too high?

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* stevea stevea...@softworkers.com [150817 20:08]:
 I am disappointed to see landuse=forest removed from the very 
 quintessence of what our wiki defines as forest: our USDA's 
 National Forests.  [..]
 [..] It does 
 not appear that a consensus is reached about this, as Martijn (and 
 what appear to be folks in the UK and Germany, largely) seem to agree 
 to remove landuse=forest, but at least Charlotte and I believe it 
 should remain.

Assuming we keep landuse=forest for the National Forests, what would
you suggest we use to tag the areas that are actually covered by trees?
And how should we render these so they can be seen as different from
areas without trees that happen to be part of a National Forest?

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] [Imports] Importing Tesla Superchargers

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Charles Samuels o...@charles.derkarl.org [150412 22:21]:
 On Sunday, April 12, 2015 01:12:12 AM Andy Allan wrote:
 Right now, if a tag doesn't match with supercharge.info, I overwrite
 OSM's.

 Could you explain this a bit further? For example, if supercharge.info
 has capacity 6, and I correct this to capacity 8, does your script
 then overwrite my tag and change it back to the incorrect value?

 Correct. My intent is that I expect OSM to be no better than 
 supercharge.info, 
 so for now it's easiest to just overwrite. Then on following runs of it, I 
 manually investigate the changes made in OSM and reconcile the differences.

Sounds like the perfect way to drive away mappers, in other words: a pretty
bad idea. Investigating existing differences and reconciling the two data
sets looks like a much better (and acceptable) way to me.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] GNIS POI populations

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Minh Nguyen m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us [150128 09:12]:
 [..]
 It doesn't sound like Paul was proposing to systematically eliminate 
 place=hamlet POIs. It sounds like he was evaluating each one on its merits.

 I do delete GNIS POIs fairly regularly, but not just because they're 
 tagged place=hamlet. It's usually because it's a mobile home park that I 
 can turn into a more accurate landuse=residential. Or it's the name of a 
 railroad junction torn out a century ago that now sits in the middle of 
 wilderness. (There is place=isolated_dwelling in the event that a small 
 cluster of houses is still called by that name.)

I used to delete these now unpopulated railroad junction POIs earlier,
but nowadays I just reclassify them as place=locality because the names
seem to be still in use in many cases.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] GNIS POI populations

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Richard Fairhurst rich...@systemed.net [150113 19:50]:
 Minh Nguyen wrote:
 I think we should consider a mechanical edit to update these tags

 While you're thinking about GNIS mechanical edits, could I suggest one for
 GNIS-sourced POIs with (historical) in the name?

 There are several gazillion amenity=post_office, name=Fred Creek Post Office
 (historical) in the database. Clearly these aren't actually post offices any
 more. Ideally I guess they should be disused:amenity=post_office, or
 historic:amenity, or something.

 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Aopenstreetmap.org+gnis+historicalgws_rd=ssl

 I'd do it myself but this is about the one area where you _do_ need JOSM
 rather than P2. ;)

In Montana I have removed rather than changed these POIs, as they definitely
no longer existed before the GNIS import. Removing these for all of the US
would be a good thing, especially for hospitals. We definitely don't want
people in an emergency to end up in the middle of an empty field because
they followed their navigation device to Podunk Hospital (historical).

Checking the other POIs if they have been changed to (historical) status
since the import might also be a good idea.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Dirt Roads (formerly: Abandoned railway)

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

* Mike N nice...@att.net [140901 14:45]:
 On 9/1/2014 7:53 AM, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
 I think the other half of the equation, however, is actually getting this
 fixed across the country. At present it appears to be just a small number of
 mappers doing it in their areas;

To be honest, I don't really get the problem with excessive 
 'residential', or what I'd do to fix it.   If I had to study the roads 
 where I live, a few would be upgraded to tertiary or changed to 
 unclassified, and all unnamed residential would be changed to driveway, 
 but the end result would have very few changes (with the exception of 
 unnamed residential - which could be done with a bot).

I guess you haven't done much in the rural parts of the US yet. Have a
look at Lincoln County MT: You will find A LOT of tracks. Most of these
had been tagged as residential highway in the TIGER import (with horrible
distorted geometry of course), and no way could this have been fixed with
a bot. Took me about two years to get this county into the current state.

Wolfgang
(your friendly German Guest Mapper :-)

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Re: [Talk-us] Sidewalks as footpaths

[Wolfgang Zenker]

* Mike N nice...@att.net [140430 18:21]:
 On 4/30/2014 11:38 AM, William Morris wrote:
 Is there a general OSM policy on marking sidewalks as highway=footway?
 User dolphinling appears to have gone crazy in downtown Burlington,VT
 tracing the sidewalks and calling them footways.

It does add a great deal of clutter to those maps that render 
 footways.   But for those who wish to be able to use OSM data for 
 accurate pedestrian or handicapped routing, the only way is to draw all 
 the sidewalks, curb cuts, and pedestrian crossings.

AFAICS there are basically two ways in use to get information on sidewalks
into OSM:
- map sidewalks as separate ways
- use http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sidewalk to add information
  on sidewalks to the main highway.

Both methods should be usable for pedestrian routing; using separate
ways allows for more detailed micro-mapping, e.g. width and paving of
the sidewalk, but is a lot more difficult to get it right because you
need to connect these ways with the main highway everywhere a pedestrian
could cross the highway.

Wolfgang

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[Talk-us] Rural Montana - can we find local mappers?

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

for the last two years I have been cleaning up TIGER data and adding
named waterways in Lincoln County, Montana. This work is now finished.
This doesn't mean our map there is now in any way complete, just that
the data that we DO have is no longer obviously horribly wrong.

While there are still a few things that could be done by an armchair
mapper, having local mappers would be a lot easier. Only the fact
that the county has an average population density of 5 people per
square mile might make it a bit unlikely that a lot of locals find
OSM accidently. So some outreach to local groups and institutions
like hiking clubs, tourist associations, boy and girl scouts,
chambers of commerce etc. could be helpful.
My problem here is that I'm living on a different continent, in
a different cultural environment with a different native language
and 8 time zones away, so I'm probably not the best choice to try
connecting with local people in that area.
Any US mappers that want to help? Please speak out.

Wolfgang

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Re: [Talk-us] Separate relations for each direction of US State highways.

[Wolfgang Zenker]

Hi,

* Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org [131218 20:46]:
 I am having second thoughts on the colon separator for
 role=north:unsigned. The colon separator seems to be more common in
 keys, like lanes:forward=2, lanes:backward=2 etc. while the semicolon
 or pipe seem to be more prevalent to separate values. The pipe
 character seems to be more widely used when there is an ordered set of
 elements, like lanes:maxspeed=40|60|60 to indicate speed limits for
 lanes 1,2,3 respectively, whereas the semicolon seems to be used as a
 more generic separator like destination=Salt Lake City;Reno. (Even
 there you could argue that there is an ordering, the first element
 would appear first on the sign, the second one below that.)

 So I changed the wiki
 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway_Directions_In_The_United_States
 to reflect this and propose the semicolon approach:

 role=north;unsigned.

 OK?

the semicolon is usually the separator that you use if you have several
unrelated values that unfortunately share the same key; I would interpret
role=north;unsigned as 'this object has both the tags role=north AND
role=unsigned'. I recommend staying with the colon approach, because
we don't want to express two separate independent roles but the role
north which happens to be of the unsigned version in this object.

Wolfgang

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