Did you hear?

We plan to bring StreetComplete to iOS!

For all that have been eagerly awaiting this to happen, there is more good news, however!

Prototype Fund

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I would like to tell you about another small project I will be working on for the next months. It is made possible by a NLNet NGI Zero Discovery grant:

Missing maxspeed

Inferring default speed limits for situations where concrete maxspeed information is missing. Last time I checked, only 12% of roads had this tagged at all and while the number of roads tagged with maxspeed of course is increasing, so is the number of roads.

Compared with highway=unclassified, it looks pretty much like a zero sum game. This means, that not only did OSM based router software always have to fill huge holes in data to produce reasonably precise ETAs (etc.), it is also not something that will get any better on a global scale in the foreseeable future.

Why so sketchy?

It’s also understandable why the data is so sketchy: Roads can simply be traced from satellite imagery. Finding speed limit signs on the other hand often requires to look for them on-site or via good Mapillary / KartaView coverage which is in itself already much more time-intensive. Not only that - it’s even more time-intensive to confirm that there is no signed speed limit for a given segment of road as the speed limit sign could be located all the way down the road. (One reason why the speed-limits quest is disabled in StreetComplete.)

Finally, if it turns out there is no sign, tagging the correct maxspeed requires knowing the traffic legislation in the country one is mapping in. (And sometimes one errs in what one thinks is correct. Did you know that the default no-speed-limits in Germany are technically are not limited to the Autobahn?)

Goal

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StreetComplete v45.0 now has overlays! Finally!

You can load the alpha version from GitHub, the beta and release versions will be rolled out in a few weeks, when the bugs are ironed out. Please report any issues you find!

Overlays are a new way in which data is represented and editable on the map, additional to and orthogonal to quests: Display and edit just one aspect of OpenStreetMap, but allow it to be edited in an easy and efficient way.

Overlays help contributors to comprehensively record the kind of data that has the most value if it is mapped area-wide - for example addresses, POIs, sidewalks, cycle lanes, smoothness and other properties that are used as part of a network (e.g. for routing). In particular, overlays make it easy to identify where the information is missing and see at one glance if the information is (still) correct.

The initial version just includes two overlays to select from, “sidewalks” and “street lighting”. More will follow in the future but can also be contributed by others, just like quests, see the overlay guidelines.

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