I have been mapping my home town of Gudivada. This is where I grew up and did all my schooling. In the Telugu language, “Gudi” means temple, and “vada” means a settlement or a town - Gudivada has many Hindu temples.

When I decided to map, I expected that since this is a small town there would just be a node with a name, and not much else. I was wrong though - trunk, primary, secondary, and tertiary roads along with many points of interests and buildings around the center had been well mapped, thanks to the active OpenStreetMap community.

I focused my efforts on mapping residential streets, and adding places like hospitals, temples and schools I was certain about.

Before and after

Here are the residential roads I added within Gudivada. A number of features such as water bodies, public water tanks, school names and area names which I have added most recently are not visible in the ‘after’ gif due to OpenStreetMap not rendering those objects at that zoom level.

Closeup of my edits

Here is a closeup of my edits in my hometown. One issue I encountered was not being 100% sure about road names so refrained from adding local names to the roads. For example, as I was mapping, I came across “Eluru Road” which goes across the town - my hunch is that this road has a different official name.

Link to the map

What I added and modified:

• Missing residential roads were added
• Re-classified many roads to Tertiary roads based on road classification documentation
• Added places like schools, school grounds, property boundaries, water bodies, places of worship, stadium and other amenities.
• Misaligned roads
• Added amenities for existing buildings
• Intersections

What’s next?

I’ve enjoyed mapping my hometown and added numerous features which I am intimately aware of. My plan is to add more details based on satellite imagery and local knowledge, and do a field survey the next time I visit to ground-truth Gudivada data on OpenStreetMap.

I’d also welcome any comments others in the community have to improve what I’ve mapped, or tips for mapping.