Milestones are public domain but not in OpenStreetMap

There are currently 162 highway=milestone tags in the Netherlands: https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/europe/netherlands/tags/highway=milestone#map, I do not see this being completed by hand.

I am not sure how reliable the data of Rijkwswaterstaat is, would be good to do a limited test, but if the data is good, I see no problems with an import an sich.

Just like the AND data, 3dShapes, BAGimport, etc. I think it can improve the usefulness of the data.

Once imported, what happens then? Hands-up for cleaning up and maintenance of hectometershield data on all roads.

This is doomed to fail unless the people who use it perform the maintenance of this dataset in OSM. If it’s aimed at emergency handling, the emergency people or providers of emergency applications would have to maintain the dataset.

When we have to glue the milestones to the road…that will be a heck of a job.

Send location to the emergency control room. Consent to locate mobile phone. => geolocation.
Use OSM as background and for navigation / routing instructions to the pinpointed geolocation.

I have a principle objection against having safety critical information in OSM itself; information that everybody, willfully or unintentionally can change or damage. These services can use OSM as background and have their own layer, on their own server, over it.

This apart from my personal preference that I do not appreciate too see all hydrants, lampposts, milestones (kilometermarkers by the way here), electrical cabinets, emergency accesses in OSM.

I have a few questions about a possible import of these hectometer signs / ‘milestones’:

  • How accurate is the location of the signs? I think the best location to put these in OSM is at the exact location of the sign, next to the road. Would this import lead to a lot of signs spread over the roadway or would they be exactly on the location of the sign (e.g. accuracy of 25 cm).
  • How would you translate the information on the signs to OSM tags? They usually contain a distance in km with 1 decimal accuracy, a road number and a carriageway reference (Li, Re, or a letter).

The traffic sign code of a hectometer sign is BB07, so I think the tag traffic_sign=NL:BB07 should be added to the hectometer signs.

I would like to add to the people saying; survey it.
It’s practically impossible in my view to survey these signs with any degree of accuracy. The problem is that you can’t get close to them, and if you try anyway you’ll have Rijkswaterstaat stopping on the shoulder in no time asking what on earth you are doing!
Maybe with the new 7,5 cm aerial imagery combined with very high quality rapid automatically taken photographs from a car you could do it, but it would be a massive job.
So I think, either import them or don’t add them at all.

How’s this handled in other countries? Dktue, do you have any insight there? From Germany and/or elsewhere?

Hectometer signs is not something I’ll survey, neither am I missing them. But I can imagine use cases, so I wouldn’t mind a well-executed import.

Just wondering, is there a layer that shows the milestones?

Can anybody explain why we even would like to have these markers at an accuracy of 25 cm, when even possible? Emergency services do not need that at all.

Do not only ask yourself the question what is possible, but think about the added value. Hectometermarkers is imho too farfetched.

We have talks with the emergency people of different safety regions (Veiligheidsregio’s) about using OSM for emergency handling. We have asked them what is important. None of them have mentioned milestones.

The Roadside Assistance (Wegenwacht, “triple A”, Pannenhilfe) might have use for it, but if that is the case, they should at the same time build it into their applications and organize the maintenance and quality assurance of the data. My guess is they already use an application of their own, showing a layer with “official” data on top of a background map which might even be OSM. Probably only whole kilometers, not hectometers.
Callers don’t need them because they are on the road and can see them live.

I think this use case is very weak. That said, there are a lot of those in OSM: no use case, but it’s a visible thing, so it can be mapped. If anyone thinks it’s important* and makes work of it, fine, map it, import it with the usual doc / prep / check, maintain it. Provided that the geolocation data is accurate enough, so we don’t get milestones all over the roadway. If that happens (not incidental but structural), I say revert and clean up the data before retry.

  • I micromap underground waste containers. No use case at all, I just do it. My quirk.

I’ve been accused that removing a non-used road (i.e. tags connected by a line) would cause too much server load: https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=834541#p834541
Please never use this excuse again, if someone decides that importing milestones would be a great idea.

In the german Bundesland Thüringen mappers did the effort and mapped all milestones with Mapillary (Overpass for all Milestones in Thüringen, Example for one milestone).

Hi dktue, I don’t get it, it looks like the Dutch community has any appetite to take the task you’re carrying and advertising.
Even adding the use of Mapillary is not a well thought option since there are less and less users over here, even the hardest fans of the system are leaving it behind. Since the buy out of idealism has brought another captain to serve Mapillary.

Let’s say, while there are no principle objections, there is no enthousiasm either.

https://www.pdok.nl/geo-services/-/article/nationaal-wegen-bestand-nwb-#bf11140565845b93050fa872fdcb2e3b

Bedoel je deze wms?

https://geodata.nationaalgeoregister.nl/nwbwegen/wms?request=GetCapabilities

Voor wat het waard is: deze materie was ook in Vlaanderen aan de orde. Op de BE-mailing list las ik volgende, blijkbaar afkomstig van de bevoegde Vlaamse overheid “Agentschap Wegen en Verkeer”:

I am enthusiastic. The coordinate information from the milestone signs has a variety of applications (also non-safety-critical). For ordinary road users, the most popular use-case is locating mobile speed limit enforcement. More generally, this information is a useful anchor for data fusion with other data sources, and locating incident reports on the map. Within OSM, it also allows internal verification of ref and carriageway_ref tags on ways.

I would prefer to avoid gluing the milestones to the ways, and instead put the milestone nodes at the actual location of the milestone. This practice is also accepted for traffic signs, and is less annoying if you simply want to edit the ways without editing milestones.

I think it would be most convenient if there is some sort of BAG-like synchronisation process, so that after the initial import, we can re-import a particular road segment upon request, e.g. after major infrastructure changes.

(Short: we don’t use that anymore for practical reasons.)
We can regret such developments but telephone boxes have also disappeared because no one uses them anymore (well, they were disabled).

MOD EDIT: politiek geladen opmerkingen verwijderd

Onze zuiderburen hebben of hadden hetzelfde probleem (betrouwbaarheid) als gemeld in # 4.
Jeroen, ik verwacht dat de geschilderde km markeringen die als los staande platforms, de werkelijk juridische onderliggende waarde vertegenwoordigen, vooral zichtbaar voor helicopter bemanningen. Die kunnen als markering dienen en zijn ook standvastig en staan verder van de weg.
Commodoortje, kijkend naar de WMS laag vindt ik het geen verbetering van de onderliggende kaart, maar ik kan geen duidelijk beeld vormen zonder zooming.
Geldt voor deze objecten niet hetzelfde als de Utrechtse bomen, importeer niet alles wat geimporteerd kan worden zonder dat het beheer goed is geregeld !