sev_osm thanks for sharing this. I can imagine the pains you had to cone through and difgiculties you faced. I’ve went through similar ecperience elsewhere.

HOT was always very mysterious to me and I always felt that beeing it such a wonderful idea it should have achieved much more during years. I feel its potential is not achieved. Basicaly (and I am enthusiastic OSM mapper) the only visible thing for me is Tasking manager - the rest of the story - how the maps are then used for Humanitarian purposes is a big question. Maybe its time to set up small meaningful alternative to HOT. Pethaps around one single meaningful project and grow from there.

One more thing - you write you regret you did not act earlier and differently. I understand that fully. I had similar experience and the only thing I can tell is - do not do another mistake. Now when you are finally out you must see big relief personally. You wrote this blog - your “comingout” - so the situation is resrlved for you personally and you may have a wish to put all this behind you and forget it. Pkease do not. Speak about it repeatedly, talk to anyone who will listen, tell the story again and again, give more examples and real names. It will prolong the pain for some time, but eventually it will come back in a good way when enough people will start to think about it. Do not let it go away as single shout into darkness.

All the best

Please not that still I did some nice mapping based on your data, so thanks a lot and I wonder if you will be able to correct the problem, because I see similar navigational problems every since and than and it is nice to see some systematic approach to them.

BTW there is another typical junction (used more for smaller roads) with no space for you scenario

https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/danieljh/cj42l3yw05epa2sqvellka881.html?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiZGFuaWVsamgiLCJhIjoiTnNYb25JSSJ9.vYOnsuu1zeKcGW2nj0uJZw#16.26/50.52168/13.54504

I started to map Czechia and found these false positives at first

• odd place but all turns are actually possible
• all turns possible
• all turns possible

But than I started to see that most of the places in Czechia (and I think this is valid for most of Europe at least for the Countries I visited) will be FALSE positives by principal. Most of the “regular” junctions with motorway (not counting the big complex ones) will look like this

https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/danieljh/cj42l3yw05epa2sqvellka881.html?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiZGFuaWVsamgiLCJhIjoiTnNYb25JSSJ9.vYOnsuu1zeKcGW2nj0uJZw#16.9/49.72333/13.356

Where there is NO place for your scenario. Even thought the turn to motorway link might be < 90 deg for one of the directions (it will be unless is it exactly 90). There is no reason to think it is a mistake. You should at least check the onway tag.

More sophisticated applrpoach would be to to detect if the are TWO options how to get on the motoway - if there is only one, it is highely probable that it will be accessible from both directions unless the angle is really small.

OK, you made my Sunday. Going to correct Czechia :)

@IamColleen assuming optimisticaly that it catches all/most of vandalism

Great initiative! I see one danger thought. Usually a city or village is also connected to surrounding region. Both the city and the region cam be mapped in OSM (and in Czechia they always are) having the same or similar name. One needs to be carefully to attach the wiki data label to the right area than. If needed I can easily fingers and example.

I think that the problem with airports is a general one. The apperance of any feature is fixed to the zoom level. But this can NEVER work in general. If you set up such parameters correctly for a crowded city it wont work for a desert or nature with few villages. If you set it up for less populated areas, it will be broken for cities.

Currently the result is (at least as I feel it for areas in Czech republic) that in zooms below 11 there is not much usefull information and one must zoom in to get some - and there is tons of empty space on the map (well not really empty but with no labels and pois). But again it is uselles to adjust it for such a case because it would break somewhere else.

I thik we need to instroduce something as “density of map” and adjust the apperance of features, labales etc, according to this. This density would be dependent on location on the map and can even be precalculated every week or so (as it does not change that fast).

Second possible approach simmilar to this one would be not to use “absolute zoom” to decide if the feature should be displayed / labelled or not, but use “importancy scale”. Every feature would have an “importancy” - for the starters we can use the lowest zoom it shows on, but it can be refined. Than the algorithm to form a map for area would be as follows:

1. start with highest importancy
2. find all fatures with this importancy in the displayed area
3. determine how “crowded” is the rendered view so far
4. if it is not “too crowded” than repeat the process (from step 2) with lower importancy
5. if it is “too crowded” than stop

The importancy can be different for object itself and for its label and of course it can be much complicated than that, but this is just the basic simplified idea. The result would be that at any zoom and any place the map will look resonably informative / not too crowded. Also note that in large maps you may want to run this process more “locally” i.e. to some extent independedly for each part of the map.

Nice job :)

Funny observation - I have randomly mapper some places in CZ and DE and all of them were some sort of insustrial areas with lot of dirt foads - mostly land-fills or mines. It seems that drivers driving dump cars like to use OSM :)

Good work. You make it disappear by “solving it”. They will disappear after some time.

I agree that there users should not be forced to use google recapcha. In addition to what has been said, it helps google with digitalizing the books and there might be people who do not want to help google in this - the project has many contraversories, including data licencing and unhappy authors of books beeing digitalized. Therefore users of project like openstreetmap with very different philosophy should not force its users to contribute to google digitalization.