+1

I can't understand why people would want to donate their time so Google can profit from it...

JOSM doesn't work with anything but sun jre afaik, and it sounds like your phone it trying to run JOSM like a midlet which is j2me not jre...

navit has been ported to android, instead of needing rendered tiles it uses a data file and produces vector maps.

You should have added a location to your post so people can see your work.

@Dan there is no road data imported in Australia.

@MCC it might be an indication someone roughly drew them in based on the location of other streets? Did you email the previous editors about the mistakes?

Instead of real aircraft you could look into small UAV drones, you can fly these up to 400ft in most places without special permission, there is someone selling them in Europe pre-built pre-tested for about 999 euros...

@seav as long as it's not a highway type that renders it shouldn't matter, I doubt anyone will intentionally render highway=nonexistent, also it shouldn't matter if it's conencted or not, just as long as it's tagged explicitly that it doesn't exist, using a note=* or otherwise.

do you mean tagging things amenity=fuel ? or the actual icon files, which are in SVN?

@RichardB If we do as you suggested and don't mark them what are we supposed to add a note against?

@marscot because tagging something as highway=motorway would render, which defeats the purpose of the exercise as we only want these ways to be visible to editors otherwise people think they exist and go and "fix" them which in turn means you can't tell if they were surveyed or not.

@rogermeier at this point in time it's very difficult to get consensus on this and other topics in the broader OSM community and to some degree I've stopped bothering to a large extent beyond the talk-au community.

@RichardB, within 50 sq km there is 100s of such roads, doing this any other way but non-geospatially would be pointless, no one would bother trying to look up if the road exists or not, not to mention the wiki would end up being next to useless because searching wouldn't accomplish much.

@Pink Duck, I think highway=proposed gets rendered, ideally these ways shouldn't be rendered, just visible in editors, they aren't dismissed either as they might get built in future if there is demand...

@PhilippeP I don't know how to make it clearer about why to do this, these roads exist on paper, they don't exist in reality and without some distinction that they don't exist you can't tell if they have or haven't been surveyed so people will go out of their way to survey something that doesn't exist, potentially a lot of someones surveying the same thing that doesn't exist multiple times.

The whole point is so people know what is worth spending time to survey and what is a waste of time because it doesn't exist.

Yes, people need to check the alignment of yahoo imagery against known GPS points before shifting existing roads etc.

Google knows all! They probably read your thoughts before you wrote them down :)

Seriously though, they do well at search and they are researching context based searching...

Longreach is missing the north side of the railway line, also I'm not sure if the boundaries or the GPS traces are more accurate, things seem to be a little whack.

I don't see a big problem with Kilcoy, I can't find any traces I made going through Kilcoy but if you download the existing GPS traces the boundaries are "within tollerance" imho.

Also roads don't go down the centre of the gaps between boundaries, this is just area allocated for roads, but the roads can be anywhere within that area.

So far the only real error I've seen is in Gympie and the local council is most likely to blame for not updating boundaries when they realigned the road way on one small section of road.

We (Australians) share your pain, we've been attempting to modify the default style sheets to make maps from OSM data more useful, but it's a complex subject and so we haven't made much head way so far.

There is underground coal mining near Newcastle, NSW and some of these tunnels go for hundreds of km up and down the central coast of NSW north of Sydney.