Handling 'construction tag' issues

Hello,

I’m having a look at issues raised by the OSM Inspector, and in particular issues around proposed roads.

In the area I’m looking there are lots of instances of things like highway=service,construction=service or highway=unclassified,construction=secondary.

Am I right in thinking these will need first-hand knowledge to resolve, as it’s not possible to determine the intention behind them, or whether construction is now complete?

Thanks,

Nick

In an ideal world, you would be able to look at the change history and tell from the changeset descritpion whether construction was complete. Unfortunately, very few people write good descriptions.

However, you can still add changeset comments, asking the person who created the conflicting tagging, to explain and/or correct…

It’s also worth looking at which editor they used & how experienced a mapper they are. I think the construction=* tag may not show in “Simple” editor views and thus it may not be obvious that it needs to be deleted when the highway tag is changed from construction. (I normally use an advanced edit view and change the construction key to highway therefore overwriting the older highway=construction tag).

If there is a reasonable history of highway=construction followed by replacement after a sensible gap of time, it’s reasonable to suppose the construction tag is outdated.

For new construction of roads or trails, sometimes you can deduce that construction is complete by noticing a lot of traces in Strava. (EDIT: …when it works.)

I often use the “Strava cycling and running heatmap” layer for alignment, and notice a lot of “athletes” leave their devices running and record their drives as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

There seems to be more activity with Strava than OSM GPS traces, so I usually check Strava first.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

I’ll probably tackle some lower hanging fruit initially as I don’t want to tread on other people’s toes.

Cheers,

Nick