Guides to improve navigation data on OSM

As a part of our recent push to improve navigation data on OpenStreetMap, the team at Mapbox started mapping turn lanes with the help of local mappers in San Francisco, Washington DC and Los Angeles areas. The initial documentation on turn lanes that was referred during the mapping project was the OpenStreetMap wiki on turn:lanes. However as the mapping started progressing, our team started to discover edge cases which have not been covered adequately on the wiki.

As a result, we started sharing our observations and discussed mapping strategies with the OSRM team, which we compiled into a guide for Mapping to improve navigation data in OpenStreetMap. The guide is designed to help anyone who wants to improve OpenStreetMap data from the perspective of navigation, to understand routing and guidance, and different scenarios that can help during data validation.

The guide is still at a nascent stage and concentrating mainly on turn:lanes mapping in the US, but the team intends to expand this guide to include everything from mapping turn:restrictions, speed limits, oneways, destination signs, exit numbers and more as a part of overall push for improved navigation data in OpenStreetMap.

It will be great to have more eyes from the community on the Mapping guide to improve navigation data in OpenStreetMap and suggest areas on which to improve in our mapping repository. We hope this will be a valuable resource for both mappers and users of this data for various routing applications.

Our roadmap is to keep expanding the topics as we work on our mapping tasks and finally upgrading the documentation on the OSM Wiki. Safe routing!