Improving OSM in Canada one day at a time

Ever since we started our mapping project in Canada, nearly 8 months ago, we’ve been continuously working on bringing the OSM data to the level where all elements needed for routing get as detailed as possible.

Whether we are talking about the basics of road networks such as geometry, naming, or traffic flow direction, to in-depth details like the number of lanes, turn lanes, turn restrictions, signposts, and even complex relations referring to highways, we edit everything.

Our main focus is oriented towards the Top 5 metro areas: Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary. These are the places where we spent most of our time researching for open data, adding new features, editing existing ones. In order to make sure that the overall state of OSM throughout the entire region of Canada is in a navigable ready state, we’ve also included the first 50 cities based on population.

So, let’s see some numbers and graphs because everybody likes those. If we start looking at the numbers for the entire region we can see a significant rise in road geometry that was added, around 3% (25,330 miles) out of the total numbers of miles. The same goes for roads that previously did not have name tags with a rise of a little over 3.5% (16,799 miles).

A more significant change can be noticed for features that weren’t extensively mapped before in the area, such as turn restrictions rising from 5254 to 54891, or signposts that hadn’t been mapped under the same standardized method. With the help of OpenStreetCam and Mapillary pictures, we’ve managed to add relevant signpost information increasing the number of nodes well over 68%.

If we break down the numbers for the Top 5 areas, the most noticeable changes can be observed for both Toronto and Montreal where one-way tags and signpost information have been improved.

One of our main goals is to focus not only on quantity but especially on quality. This is why we have multiple tools for integrity checking that are run periodically on the entire region of Canada. These tools cover a wide variety of cases that are being corrected weekly, such as road name flip-flops, unconnected ways, smoothness problems, misnamed roads, road names having their suffixes or prefixes abbreviated, and many more.

We make use of different QA tools (KeepRight/Osmose) to search and track issues in OSM that have either been added by mistake or have remained unedited after large imports. We’re also on the lookout to improve way accuracy and fix alignment issues.