[OSM-talk] [Talk-us] Find missing roads

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org> wrote:

> Paul,
>
> The GPS data is from Scout (US as well as Skobbler / Global) users. It is
> collected during navigation sessions as well as in Scout Global ‘free
> drive’ mode.
>
> The fact that you see incomplete sets is to do with pretty high thresholds
> we set for the validity of a tile as a whole. We want to prevent that we
> present too many false positives that would make the experience frustrating.
>
> It turns out that Scout is in fact used a fair bit by commercial drivers,
> so you’ll see a bunch of tiles depicting access=private service roads on
> factory lots and so on. There’s not really a great way for us to filter
> those out up front, other than convincing drivers to shut down their nav
> session before they enter a private road ;)
>

I actually consider this a good thing since private roads are something
that are underserved right now.  It would be nice to be able to enable a
more complete data layer in order to see what was filtered out to avoid a
false positive, however, since it can be hard to determine if a driveway is
the one commonly used or if a driveway with a gate on it is manned or
simply there for the convenience of a fire crew to crash open in an
emergency (is my region the only one where fire trucks are equipped with
ramming bumpers and fire crews prepared to run over fences and locked
gates?)


> If you look closely you’ll also see traces from trains, airplanes etc.
> People use Scout in some places we had not really imagined! We try to
> filter these out based on speed and we’re improving the algorithm to filter
> out traces that match to railways in the future as well.
>

Granted, plane might not be very useful, but for the other modes, having
some kind of color coding to share what vehicle type is being used would be
awesome.

As a Scout user, I'd really find it handy if it had some of the warning
alarms and lane guidance that Osmand has...I'd really love to be able to
hold an Android app up as a real Garmin killer in terms of functionality.
Maybe include a truck mode where you can enter vehicle width, height,
weight and length so those restrictions can be taken into consideration as
well.  Osmand has a truck mode, given the people I've met on the road
driving a truck myself, I think Osmand in general is probably a lot too
fiddly for the segment of "commercial drivers who aren't GIS nerds", which
is only slightly larger than the segment of "commercial drivers who are not
me."
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