Over the past 7 weeks, Mapbox Data team completely concentrated on aligning and improving the road network of Taiwan. With regular interaction with the community in our mapping ticket and a series of diary posts about our findings, progress and learnings, we have reached the finish line of the task.

Area Covered

Current Status

Using updated Mapbox satellite imagery and Strava heat map and different offsets with respect to Bing imagery, the data team has aligned 64,680kms of road network in Taiwan which forms the 54.4% of entire Taiwan road network. The overall project consisted of 43 tasking manager tasks covering 27,000 sq kms which is 74% of total area of the country.

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Over the past few weeks, Mapbox Data Team has been reviewing the OpenStreetMap Data quality in Taiwan with respect to Satellite imagery. By running a comparison against Bing Imagery and available GPS traces like Strava Heat Map we were seeing a notable data offset of 15-20 meters with respect to GPS Traces.

Data offset

Some observations

• City centers have varying offset which is not aligning to GPS Traces.

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Subway systems are usually operated by a specific agency or are unified under a single network name. By mapping the railways stations in a system using a consistent network or operator tag, it is possible to provide a unique identity to those stations or lines on the map, just like a local person is used to.

The recent roll out of Mapbox Streets V7 included custom metro icons for 22 major subway networks based on these OpenStreetMap tags. This makes the map more usable by providing a familiar visual connection with their environment.

You can check out these customized icon on this style.

Adding missing operator and network tags

If your city has a major subway or transit system, you should consider checking the operator and network tags for consistency so that it can be supported for customized icons. To do this, you can follow this workflow that we use in our data team to identify stations that require these missing tags.

Inconsistencies in Barcelona

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Any path which is intended for dedicated foot traffic is considered a footway on OSM and tagged as highway=footway. Sidewalks that run parallel to the carriageway on one or both sides of the road and foot crossings at the junctions are sometimes mapped as seperate ways to aid in wheelchair routing.

Such ways need an additional footway=sidewalk or footway=crossing tag that can be used for specialized rendering.

Unfortunately many of sidewalks and crossings on OSM don’t have these tags and we have been trying to detect where they are as part of the sidewalk-tagging project.

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As part of the Japan Road improvement series, we just completed the very important Mega Nagoya where the task description was to align all the major roads according to orthorectified imagery from GSI using the tasking manager of TeachOSM.

The Nagoya task included

• Realigning of major roads (motorway, trunk, primary and secondary)
• Create Dual carriageways and highway_link roads with appropriate oneway tags

Nagoya was a well mapped urban area where the roads were very dense and the alignment was done by 23 excited mappers who finished the task in the period of 7days.

Next in the pipeline of improving roads in Japan is Osaka.

Osaka is a well populated second largest metropolitan city in Japan. The roads here are heavily mapped and the data density is huge. The objective of Osaka mapping task is

• Aligning the major highways(motorway, trunk, primary and secondary).
• Creating dual carriageways wherever needed with proper oneway tags.

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