I saw a local twitter post last night from someone lamenting the lack of road surface indication on Google Maps when a planned bike route suddenly went from asphalt to gravel and sand. I replied with the inelegant suggestion of an Overpass query to highlight just the paved roads. Though a route planning map that visually indicates road surface would be really nice (I’m looking at you RideWithGPS!)

I quickly noticed in the query results unpaved roads without a surface tag, which provided me with my next editing task. With a relatively small percentage of local roads without surface tags I was able to pull fairly large areas into JOSM using an Overpass Turbo query for just those roads.

highway=* and highway!=service and surface!=*

I’m excluding service roads to exclude a multitude of rural driveways and other short terminal roads. By adding a filter (surface=*) the roads I update disappear from view once I provide a surface for them making for an easy workflow.

The CANVEC imports I did for Saskatchewan roads back in 2014 included road surface, so it was mostly the hand drawn pre-2014 roads I need to add surfaces to.

One thing to watch out for. Since you aren’t downloading everything, deleting a road may delete nodes shared by roads that haven’t been downloaded. This will generate conflicts that need to be resolved when doing an upload. Resolve the conflict by selecting that the state of the affected node should be “not deleted”. Unfortunate it only detects conflicts one at a time instead of detecting all of them, so you may need to restart the upload / resolve conflicts multiple times.