This entry is for my reference and for anyone who is interested in cleaning their motorways.

I have decided to do some clean ups and fixes along a motorway (mostly linking roads) here in Australia. I think this is important for GPS usage, or otherwise clarity sake whilst viewing. I want to list the things I did to cleanup and otherwise improve.

Fixing Roads

This one should come as no surprise. It is important to use a good imagery source and offset by GPX. Keep in mind that people driving will be in different lanes, so align the road to be in the centre of this.

Different lanes should not be mapped as individual ways.

Use of destination tags on linking roads and junctions (e.g. offramps and onramps)

This one is important for GPS navigation. Here are the tags that I’m going with:

destination= This tag is for whatever the sign says, I reserve this one mostly for a Suburb or City name. Use a semicolon to separate multiple names: City 1;City 2. Mapillary and OpenStreetCam help here.

destination:street= The name of the road that is at the end of the linking road.

destination:ref= The reference number of the road that is at the end of the linking road.

destination:network= I think this one is unofficial, but I use this if the destination has a network.

Adding/Improving junctions

Someone has already done a good job at adding most. However where I am, motorway junction nodes are only present when the exit has a ref number (e.g. Exit 32). This isn’t good for exits which don’t have numbers. So to areas which didn’t have any. I’ve added them and used the destination tag on them instead.

I have also added destinations tags to existing ones where needed. These were placed as per the wiki’s instruction.

Making transition roads at junction

Although the placement=transition tag isn’t official, I like to use it on the slight bit of road that connects the motorway to the motorway_link road.

Another big clean-up here involved, putting the junctions at the last legal turn off.