Myanmar is witnessing an unprecedented growth in international tourist arrivals following major democratic reforms since 2011. On OSM, around 70,000 kms of roads have been mapped so far, or roughly 42% of the total reported roadways.

Most of the major highways (motorways, trunk, primary, secondary and tertiary roads) are well mapped in the major cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw, but there are a lot of missing residential and unclassified roads visible in the imagery. Over a period of three weeks, the Mapbox data team was able to add a total of 7,690 missing streets, out of which 2559 and 5131 streets were added in Mandalay and Yangon respectively.

Missing streets in Mingaladon locality in Northern Yangon

A full map of all objects added or modified by the Mapbox data team.

Issues we faced

• Lack of an active Myanmar mailing list or forum made it difficult to reach out to the local mapping community for collaboration.
• Identifying the streets in densely populated places is difficult because of the buildings and thick tree canopy. Lack of GPS traces in these areas also hampered the process to add missing roads.
• There is a lack of road network classification guidelines for Myanmar in the OSM wiki and the general highway classification guide was used for this purpose.
• Most roads that were previously added seem to be from lower resolution imagery and required cleanup.

How you can contribute

• Prepare an OpenStreetMap wiki for the road tagging classification in Myanmar similar to Indian roads tagging classification.
• Community members can engage in contributing to other cities of Myanmar by adding missing roads.
• It would be good if local mappers can add more GPS traces so that we can add the roads covered under canopy and buildings.
• Community members can also review our edits and give feedback.

Dhammayangyi temple in Myanmar. PD user:Hintha