Image credit: AARoads

Here at Telenav, our editing team has been working tirelessly on adding signposts to OSM for the past months. Today, I am happy and excited to report that we have completed this major editing project! We added signpost information to over 9,500 exits across the United States, covering more than 25 major metropolitan areas and a few important connecting freeways as well:

Wait - that is not ‘complete’, is it? Well, you are right. We haven’t covered every exit in the United States, not by a long shot. We have only a limited number of in house mappers, and a lot of things we want to achieve. So we prioritize the areas where we believe most people will benefit from our work. (On a personal note: that leaves me empty-handed out here in Salt Lake City - I guess I have to go out and map myself!)

We have learned a lot in the process, and we hope to contribute some of these learnings back as well. We already made quite a few improvements to the wiki pages for the exit_to and destination tags. Now that this project is complete, we will sit down and revisit these pages and add more clarification where needed. If you are interested in more tagging specifics, please see my earlier blog post on exit_to versus destination. (And don’t forget to read through the comments!)

I want to thank a few folks for making this happen. First and foremost our Telenav Mappers team, with lots of guidance from our resident road geek Robert. But also all of you in the community for giving feedback, calling us out on the occasional errors, and working with us to improve signpost mapping conventions. I feel proud to be a member of a great mapping community!