With an aim of making OpenStreetMap more navigable and accurate in routing, we started mapping turn restrictions and exit-destinations in Canada in its five important cities: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. The tasks which spread over a month have been completed; we have finished adding and validating both turn restrictions and exit-destinations in the selected cities of Canada with the support from the OpenStreetMap community.

Summary of improvements

Mapping turn restrictions was flagged off on 21 of July with data team and the community working on adding missing turn restrictions and validating the ones that are present.

As the mapping progressed, workflow was getting updated every time the team had some doubts regarding how best to map a particularly different turn restriction that was detected. The questions we had were posted on the mapping ticket we used and the community got back to us almost immediately with clarifications to our questions. We completed both adding and validating turn restrictions in 14 days.

Exit-destination mapping started on August 11. For exit and destinations, a slightly different approach was followed, unlike how we mapped previously using only checkautopista2. Each highway was considered a separate task, which was integrated into tasking manager, with a specific link to checkautopista2 that loaded that particular highway that was selected using tasking manager.

Below is the full breakdown of how many turn restrictions and exit-destinations were mapped:

Status of existing data and Mapillary coverage

We could map extensively in Toronto because of great Mapillary coverage. Ottawa had us verifying the existing exit-destination tags rather than adding new ones because most of them were already mapped. 🎉 The community raced us in adding exit-destination tags in Vancouver! 🚀 Due to less Mapillary coverage, we couldn’t map much in Montréal and Calgary. We wrapped up adding and validating exit-destinations in 9 days :)

Community support

Both the projects were met with an amazing response from the community. It was great to have you all working alongside us, helping us in adding missing data, calling out and correcting our errors, keep tabs on our edits, and clarifying doubts and questions, letting us make edits to previously added data. We thank everyone, especially Andrewpmk, Rps333, James2432, Bootprint, Puec, Fmarier, Scruss, for your support and guidance and hope the collaboration and involvement continues in all our future projects. We will continue navigation mapping in Canada, specifically in Montreal and Calgary once there is enough Mapillary or OpenStreetView coverage for us to add data and verify them.

Until then,

Cheers!

Mapbox Data Team :)