[Talk-ca] Wind farm access roads that really shouldn't be in OSM

[James Ewen]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 8:12 AM, Harald Kliems <kliems at gmail.com> wrote:

> I can't speak for Gerald, but my point was more about verifiability
> than about "verifiedness". That is, about the question whether a way
> can _in principle_ be verified vs. whether it actually _has_ been
> verified. The latter we will have to live with in large parts of
> Canada; the former I have reservations about. And according to Stewart
> this is a problem for many of the ways in question here.


So if there's a locked gate, and not all OSM mappers can get access,
do we remove the roads from the map? We should look at getting a nice
big graphic to put on the map that says "Here be Dragons!"

Obviously I'm being a little silly...

There are areas that are privately owned, and not accessible to the
general public. The Shell Scotford Refinery is a good example:

http://osm.org/go/WPrCMJzv-

The imagery available for the area is not detailed enough to be able
to draw roads, nor even verify where they are. Imagery that is
available via sources that can't be used for OSM does not show all of
the new expansion area. I have however driven through the area with my
GPS, and tracked the roads (and in some cases projected where the
roads will be once construction has finished).

How many other OSM mappers are going to gain access to the refinery
and map out the roads to ensure the accuracy of my mapping? Do my
edits stand on their own merit?

Now on the other hand, to backup your side of the argument have a look
at this way that I ran into today:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/32377502

If you compare OSM and Google Maps, you can see that both have this
road shown, which looks like part of the national road grid. Google
goes even further to draw more roads in a grid immediately north of
this road.

http://sautter.com/map/?zoom=14&lat=52.58831&lon=-111.2836&layers=B00000TFFFFFFF

In reality, there's a gate across the road, and it sure looks like a
farmyard in reality. The grid of roads that Google Maps shows is
actually the access roads between pens in an old cattle feedlot.
Someone obviously was copying roads from an aerial photo and didn't
realize what they were looking at.

So, this goes to add additional weight behind the verifiability of
roads in the OSM database.

I wouldn't suggest removing roads that are privately owned from the
database, nor removing roads that are not accessible to the general
public either. What would be preferable would be to have the roads
where access is not available to the public tagged as private, and if
gates are in place, put the gates on the map. This is the type of
ground-truthing that government boys would like to see come back out
of the OSM project.

If there were gates on the map, and the road marked as private, I
wouldn't have tried to use it as a shortcut to save myself a 20 mile
round about road trip.

-- 
James
VE6SRV