I am happy to annouce that, after a long time we, the OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers, have prepared a new major release of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website). Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take a couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

The main change that warrants a new major release is the move to the osm2pgsql flex backend. This now requires an osm2pgsql version >= 1.8.0. It, so far, only comes with very few and subtle changes in rendering results related to changes in defaults in polygon/linestring classification of closed ways. The database schema is explicitly meant to be backwards compatible from the style side so style users who render different styles from the same database should be able to continue to do so without problems. We hope to use the additional flexibility of osm2pgsql in the future, but we have decided to do this step by step - and with this release only make the formal move but not yet make larger changes to the database. Deployments none the less should do a full database reload.

What we have, however, in this release is an additional table with the commonly used values for shop and office tags. This is generated and filled with an sql script (common-values.sql) that is included in the style. This needs to be run on the database before using the style - like existing indexes.sql and functions.sql.

Here are some details on the visible changes this release brings to the style.

Stop shop/office catch-all

… See full entry

Android 13 was released in August 2022, not yesterday, but on the other hand not so long ago.

Why is this relevant?

With Android 14 google started updating the root certificates¹ with updates to its “play” services², prior to that they were only updated with full system updates and while now you can count on such updates for multiple years that used to be very different.

This is a problem for apps running on older devices that need to access resources on the Internet with encrypted connections (that is with https) as not only can such a resource change its certificate provider and potentially by doing that change the relevant certificate authority, certificates can expire or otherwise be invalidated. If that happens the resource is essentially unusable without an update to the certificate authorities.

This is not a new problem, particularly for Vespucci³ as we support devices going back to Android 5 and without the app bringing its own copy of the relevant root certificate for Let’s Encrypt⁴ along, you wouldn’t have been able to access openstreetmap.org for years on old phones.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when on last Saturday an issue was opened complaining that the Polish governments geoportal was erroring⁵, but what issues users report is not always straight forward, and this was likely the first “important” source that ran in to the problem.

Now there is a quick fix and that is that the user installs the relevant certificates on their device themselves, this requires that the relevant app trusts user installed certificates and I’ve enabled that on V21.2.4 that is being distributed now. What the situation is with this configuration with other apps is unclear.

… See full entry

Sapp

Civil Protection Areas proposal → VOTING PHASE

After 3+ weeks of silence following the RFC discussion (no further comments/objections), the proposal is now officially in Voting Phase!

📋 Wiki: osm.wiki/Proposal:Civil_Protection_Areas

🗳️ Vote until: March 23, 2026

🖼️ Live demo: https://andreadp271.github.io/civil_protection_areas_osm/

Key improvements from RFC feedback:

• Comparison tables vs assembly_point/disaster_help_point

• Clear shelter area distinctions (outdoor vs indoor)

• Refined rescue staging/logistics definitions

Please cast your {{vote

yes}}, {{vote

no}} or {{vote

abstain}} on the Wiki!

身近な標高

　標高といえば、一般的に山頂の高さをイメージすると思う。
あとは水準点、基準点とか… なので、eleを日常的に入力する機会は多くないかもしれない。
OSM wiki

入力したことないって人も多いだろうが、意外と標高は身近なところで表示されている。
それは…

1. 海抜（標高）表示板

　国土交通省が東日本大震災による津波被害を踏まえ、対策として海抜情報(海抜表示シート)を提供。
街路灯に信号、道路標識などに貼り付けており、海沿いの地域では多く設置されている。

… See full entry

Lawa Lawa Luo, Ulugawo Nias

Mentre scarico alcuni dati dal geoportale della Regione Lombardia, guardo gli ultimi nodi mappati e noto che molti di questi sono defibrillatori.

Ma perché?

Direi che è iniziato per caso, quando ne sono stati aggiunti alcuni nel campus universitario che frequento. Il senso però lo trovo qualche tempo dopo, quando alla festa di laurea di una delle mie migliori amiche la zia della festeggiata - cardiologa - mi fa giustamente notare che durante le emergenze, quando la velocità conta, è meglio sapere dove sono piuttosto che non saperlo affatto.

E questa cosa mi fa riflettere, mi risuona ininterrottamente nella testa, soprattutto se consideriamo l’attività di mapping non solo come “raccolta di dati georiferiti” ma anche come possibilità concreta di migliorare (e talvolta salvare) la vita delle persone intorno a noi.

Da allora, anche aiutandomi con MapComplete che in questo caso mi risulta utilissima, mappo tutti i defibrillatori che mi passano davanti agli occhi. Anche allungando i tempi di viaggio per fermarmi a quella fermata che mai avrei frequentato (dai, chi scende a Caiazzo?), anche per confermare lo stato di quelli esistenti.

Avrà effettivamente dei risvolti positivi sulla vita delle persone? Chi lo sa. Intanto ci proviamo.

quelli che ho mappato

l’andamento a Milano

l’andamento nella Città Metropolitana

Rail trails with route relations with railway=abandoned to denote a rail trail is not working. When the named “bike route” enters city streets or along side walks where the railroad never went this becomes and tagging nightmare.

I have had to remove railway=abandoned from a route relation in British Columbia and in New Hampshire where these were both issues. osm.org/note/5066887#map=15/41.40203/-73.62096

osm.org/note/4680502#map=15/49.49511/-121.22581

Can we find a better tags to mark bike routes with rail trail?
this is specific to route relations and not current tags for infrastructure, railway=abandoned still works for infrastructure

I would propose something like railway=trail so we keep this straight. It looks like railtrail=yes is a tag.

Yours in Mapping Natfoot

this is related to my other project on routing and bike routes. ask if you want to know more.

This is not about the Linux Foundations Overture Maps attempt to hoodwink the Open Geospatial Consortium into standardising Overtures GERS (Global Entity Reference System) ¹. There is so little technical content available in that proposal that it is difficult to write even a short paragraph about it. But it is motivated by Overtures attempt to engage in the great American tradition of selling snake oil by suggesting that GERS solves real problems ². None of the following is new, and all this has been discussed many times in the OSM community.

It isn’t as if having a persistent id for an entity isn’t useful, for example if you are running a restaurant review site³ you definitely want a way to reference and track the state of the object you have reviews for in your geodata source, be it be based on OSM or some other data. The issue is simply:

your persistent id is not my persistent id.

Or perhaps better, your persistence is not my persistence. Lets illustrate that with the restaurant review example again: assume you’ve generated an id in some fashion and map that to an OSM object (more on that below), when do you consider the current restaurant different from the original, and when do you consider it different enough that you will want a new id?

Is it

• when the name changes?
• when the location changes? What about if it has just moved to the next block?
• when the cuisine changes?
• when the chef changes?
• when the owner changes?

And so on.

The answers to these questions depend on your use case and your business logic and a global one size fits all is very unlikely to be of any help at all. Now you might say, but there are objects, places, buildings and geographical entities that have less tendency to change, at least on a typical humans time scale and yes ids could be useful for these, but they are by their very nature easily referenced by their location⁴.

… See full entry

Today I received an invitation to attend the bi-monthly OSM US Maintainers Working Group.

But due to timezone difficulties, I don’t think I’ll be able to attend it live.

The meeting agenda has been shared, mainly focusing on the topic of standards and interoperability. There are some interesting starter questions there, so I’m intrigued to answer those questions in an OSM diary instead, hoping that I’ll be able to join the discussion asynchronously.

So, here we go :

---

“What standards (geospatial file or data formats, metadata schemas, wire protocols, structured text formats, encodings, etc.) does your project depend on or interact with?”

I frequently use GeoJSON format in several of my projects.

“Are there any standards that you wish would be evolved/extended but aren’t actively maintained? Or implementations that aren’t fully compliant that you wish would be?”

GeoJSON fits pretty much all of my required use cases. My only concern right now is how to make GeoJSON files more compact. I haven’t researched much about this since there’s currently no urgent performance issue that needs to be handled, but I love tweaking my apps for performance.

“Are there standard formats or protocols that you would like to use, but aren’t well supported in your language/ecosystem?”

The General Transit Feed Specification.

I’ve been interested in this data format for a long time, but I still don’t know how to properly tinker with it. Last time I worked on this, I had to make my own Python implementation to read and navigate GTFS files. I don’t know what the current situation is right now. Maybe it’s already supported, maybe not.

“What are your thoughts on Overture’s OGC proposal?”

I already posted my thoughts in a certain Slack thread somewhere. Here’s the verbatim quote:

“Does an OGC standard become legally binding worldwide or something?

… See full entry

Finished adding villages in Nagqu City with Tibetan names listed in the Place Names Database KNAB and having a Q-id in wikidata; I’m continuing with Ngari Prefecture.

Place names in Tibetan script are viewable using maps.wikimedia.org with lang parameter set to bo.

Salut,

J’ai beaucoup édité OSM vers le milieu de l’année 2025. Maintenant, j’ai décidé de revenir!

Je vais peut-être travailler davantage sur l’Australie, et peut-être aussi sur la France, la Tchéquie, et d’autres endroits.

Tonight I finished mapping Maud, meaning the bulk of Fairview California is mapped. There are still some places along Fairview Avenue as it goes around in a circle and becomes Hayward but this is area shared by Hayward, Castro Valley and Fairview.

It feels so good to see my home there and recognizable.

I started this project in earnest on November 18th (although I did my own street back in June).

Proposal for Tagging Detector‑Operated Pedestrian Signals in OSM

Author: Derlamaer
Date: 18 February 2026

Introduction

I’m new to OSM and to cartography in general, so please excuse any imperfections in this post. As I’ve been mapping my surroundings, I noticed a gap in how we describe certain modern pedestrian crossings, and I would like to propose a way to fill it.

More and more signal‑controlled pedestrian crossings are equipped with automatic presence detectors. These sensors detect a pedestrian (or sometimes a vehicle) and trigger the traffic signal phase without requiring a push button. This behaviour is common in newer installations, but OSM’s tagging does not yet have a clear, standard way to capture it.

This diary entry describes the situation, proposes a tag, and invites feedback.

Current OSM Tagging for Signalised Crossings

Today, a typical signalised pedestrian crossing in OSM is tagged as:

highway=crossing
crossing=traffic_signals

To refine this, the OSM Wiki documents a couple of useful additional keys:

button_operated=yes/no Indicates whether a pedestrian must press a button to request the green signal.

traffic_signals:sound=yes/no Indicates the presence of an acoustic signal for visually impaired users. (See the wiki page for crossing=traffic_signals for details .)

However, there is no widely documented, standard key that says:

“This traffic signal is triggered automatically by a detector, with no need for a push‑button.”

That is the missing piece I am trying to address.

Real‑World Example (Toulouse, France)

One concrete example can be found in Toulouse, France, where several pedestrian crossings use overhead or roadside sensors (camera, infrared, radar or similar) to detect pedestrians as they approach the kerb.

A representative location is shown on Google Street View (link as used in the forum post). In such setups:

… See full entry

Die Strasse L170 von Göschweiler hört bei Schattenmühle auf. Diese sollte meiner Meinung nach weitergehen bis zur Strassenmündung K6516. Ich bin nicht zu 100% sicher, kann das jemand überprüfen und gegebenenfalls korrigieren.

Une petite investigation pour évaluer l’actualité de notre carte. Voici deux cartes:

• cinémas de Genève
• anciens cinémas de Genève et actuels

Cinémas ouverts

… See full entry

From the Build Plan developed with Claude

Project Purpose A web application enabling mappers and data quality analysts to select a geographic area, fetch Overture Maps POI data and OpenStreetMap data in parallel, algorithmically compare them, and produce two outputs: a reviewed, selective upload to OSM via OAuth2, and an annotated GeoJSON export classifying each Overture POI by assessment category.

No edits to OSM happen without manual review. Overture is more of an attention guide (at least that’s my hypothesis)

Here’s the chat

Lots of UX fine tuning to come. Quick observations:

• Overture is very noisy, lots that is irrelevant (business mailing addresses in personal houses, mislocated POIs, closed places, duplications with differences across Meta/Microsoft/4SQ sources)
• Matching is hard but can be improved
• There is useful signal in Overture, places that need addition to OSM in new developments, but you have to have means to easily sort through and keep a record.

… See full entry

In May 2025 the OSM website introduced two new optional fields in user profiles: company and location. I recently analyzed whether these fields could be useful for detecting organized (paid) editing accounts for my How Did You Contribute (HDYC) pages. Short summary:

• Around 66k active user profiles analyzed
• About 1,000 unique company entries
• About 2,200 location values

Interestingly, large companies such as Apple, Amazon, or Meta still mostly appear in the profile description, not in the dedicated company field. I wrote a more detailed blog post here.

While working on this analysis I also added username history to HDYC, derived from the full changeset replication history. I am not fully happy with the current presentation and would appreciate feedback:

1. Move the username section further down?
2. Add a time-based filter (e.g. last 5–10 years)?
3. Remove it.

Until recently, I mainly used the opening_hours evaluation tool to quickly generate valid OSM opening hours. However, it often requires some manual work to simplify the syntax afterwards.

That’s why I tried using ChatGPT instead - and it works surprisingly well. You can simply copy and paste opening hours from websites, or even upload an image, and ask it to format them for the opening_hours tag.

Example

LLM query

please format the opening hours in the attached image for the OSM 'opening_hours' tag.

Output

Mo 13:00-18:00; Tu-Th 09:30-18:00; Fr 09:30-21:00; Sa 09:00-17:00; Su off

This is a rather simple example, but it also works well with more complex opening hours.

Taking info from

https://www.rigacci.org/wiki/doku.php/doc/appunti/hardware/gps_logger_i_blue_747

and

https://www.technologyblog.de/2019/05/gps-rollover-zerstoert-gps-logger/

and

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Holux_M-241

a modified mtkbabel can set the time when reading from the device. That should probably go into some check whether it’s really a M-241 that is connected, but as long as the battery lasts the device shows the correct time again and logs tracks in this year and not dated 2006..

$ diff -u /usr/bin/mtkbabel ./mtkbabel
--- /usr/bin/mtkbabel   2019-10-12 12:23:29.000000000 +0200
+++ ./mtkbabel  2026-03-03 19:37:37.482923895 +0100
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@
 #-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 my $debug    = $LOG_WARNING;     # Default loggin level.
 my $port     = '/dev/ttyUSB0';   # Default communication port.
-my $baudrate = 115200;           # Default port speed.
+my $baudrate = 38400;           # Default port speed.
 my $ro_weeks = 0;                # Weeks offset to fix Weeks Rollover Bug

 # GPX global values.
@@ -356,6 +356,18 @@
     set_data_types($model_id);
 }

+# Set time to work around week rollover bug
+
+my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year) = gmtime;
+
+$year += 1900;      # year is years since 1900
+$mon  += 1;         # month is 0-11
+
+packet_send(sprintf('PMTK335,%04d,%02d,%02d,%02d,%02d,%02d', $year, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec));
+$ret = packet_wait('PMTK001');
+printf "Set time string: $year, $mon, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec\n";
+printf "Return for setting time: $ret\n";
+
 #-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 # Erase memory.
 #-------------------------------------------------------------------------