10/09/2026-16/09/2026

Mapping

• v7.2.0 of the iD tagging schema has been released and includes tweaks to labels, new icons, changed fields for various presets, new search terms, better documentation, improved build scripts, and more. Helper presets for some subvariants of aerialway stations, silos, and parking spots were added to make mapping easier. An actual new preset was added for offshore platforms. It includes bugfixes such as dropping bad suggestions, taginfo report includes addTags, and post boxes in USA no longer have duplicate drivethrough fields. Work continues in the background on some larger features, but changes listed above will soon be present in iD, GoMap!!, EveryDoor, StreetComplete, and other editors.

Community

• Andy Allan gave a talk at State of the Map 2026 about how OpenStreetMap’s transport layer migrated from server-side rendered map tiles to client-side rendered vector styles.
• The CoMaps team shared their experience of attending State of the Map in Paris.
• dia-jules explained, in the context of the USA, how unnecessary traffic light penalty times arise in OSRM and similar route planners, and how to reduce them specifically. If junctions on shared trunk roads are tagged as usual with highway=traffic_light at each node, the router counts multiple delays per junction, even though in reality only one set of traffic lights is passed. The more precise method instead places the tag individually at the stop line using traffic_light=signal and traffic_light:direction, so that each route passes through only one traffic light junction. To prioritise the revision, dia-jules drew on traffic volume and accident data from the Illinois Department of Transportation for the Greater Chicago area.
• Emmanuel Arrechea looked back on State of the Map 2026, held at the École Géodata in Paris, where he and other members of LaNum Pays Basque and Mapadour joined 535 participants from 45 countries. He picked out five points from more than 180 talks and workshops, among them the sponsorship of the conference by companies such as Michelin, TomTom, Esri, Thales, and Capgemini, and the way organisations including IGN, SNCF, and Géovélo build their services on OSM data. He also highlighted Grant Slater’s talk on AI crawlers straining OSMF infrastructure and driving some 400 fake account registrations a day. Most sessions are available on OSM France’s PeerTube channel with French subtitles.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Chris Fleming explained, in an OSM Blog post, how naming works in OpenStreetMap, from the primary name= tag to additional keys such as name:en= and official_name=. He used the recent official_name:en-US=Lake America addition to Lake Ontario as an example of how the name tag remains unchanged even after an official renaming, so the lake remains findable under both names. He also noted that OpenStreetMap volunteers have mapped over 115 million names to date.

Local chapter news

• Jochen Topf and Katja Haferkorn of FOSSGIS reported ► that the German Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and Public Sector Modernisation is inviting the open data community, stakeholders, and the interested public to participate in an online consultation to gather proposals and suggestions for a more developed framework, to be known as the ‘Roadmap for Open Data’. FOSSGIS has also compiled a statement on the topic.

Events

• The State of the Map 2026 is already documented on Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMpa Wiki.

Education

• High5apps explained how to add a website tag to a shop or amenity using JOSM. This short tutorial sparked quite a discussion on HackerNews.
• Aoyama Gakuin University’s Furuhashi Laboratory have published a video lecture for the 2026 academic year’s ‘Basic Spatial Information Science B’ course, which covers various topics related to OpenStreetMap.

OSM research

• HeiGIT presented an analysis of cycling infrastructure in 885 European cities, using OpenStreetMap data together with tree canopy and heat-stress data to assess how well cycling routes are protected from heat.
• HeiGIT presented new indicators for its hiWalk tool, developed in collaboration with Walk21, that use OpenStreetMap and other open data to assess factors such as path lighting, tactile paving, tree shade, and access to everyday services, providing a more comprehensive picture of urban walkability.

Maps

• cultours.app is a free interactive map of roughly 100,000 cultural heritage sites in Germany: castles, churches, ruins, memorials including Stolpersteine, Roman and prehistoric sites, towers, and viewpoints. Data comes from OpenStreetMap via Overpass, enriched with Wikipedia and Wikidata. No login, no cookies, no tracking. The developer introduced the project in the German community forum and is looking for feedback on a couple of tagging questions there.
• Dachlast.de presented an OSM-based camping map for Germany and neighbouring countries, which combines a route planner with eight data layers. The map shows campsites, motorhome pitches, drinking water points, toilets, showers, supply and disposal points, charging points, and petrol stations along the planned route. The data is ‘harvested’ weekly from OpenStreetMap and, according to the operator, comprises around 400,000 points in the area stretching from Denmark to northern Italy, eastern France and western Poland.
• The Planet Thinks is a fully turnable globe displaying live changesets on OpenstreetMap as coloured sparks.

OSM in action

• [1] The Institute of Data Sciences at the DLR (German Aerospace Centre) explained ► how geoparsing, that is, the identification of place names in texts and their association with geographical points, lines, or polygons, makes geodata usable for crisis management, supply chains, and research. The team is developing methods for toponym recognition and disambiguation, comparing these against multilingual benchmark data and applying them in various DLR projects, such as geolocating social media content during crises or analysing supply chains in the aviation industry. These methods are also being incorporated into the EU project OpenWebSearchEU, which aims to create a European alternative to dominant search providers, as well as into the collaboration with the Joint Research Centre on news analysis for European decision-makers.
• Heise reported that the interactive map by the action alliance ‘Heiße Luft‘ shows the locations of planned and under-construction data centres in Germany.
• Greenways Ireland presented the official website of the Irish Department of Transport for the country’s growing network of car-free cycle and walking routes. The interactive map uses OpenStreetMap with proper attribution and can be filtered by region, theme, and route length. As well as route descriptions, the site provides up-to-date information on route closures and an overview of the national greenway strategy.
• The Bayreuther Tagblatt reported ► that St.-Georgen-Straße in Bindlach will be completely closed for around four days from 21 September due to development work. One positive point is that the map of the surrounding area used in the article is credited as ‘© openstreetmap.org/copyright’.
• Dominik Hochwarth, of Ingenieur.de, reported ► that TU Graz has developed an OpenStreetMap-based tool that estimates the amounts of concrete, brick, and wood contained in buildings. The programme first determines a building’s size and geometry using OpenStreetMap data, then incorporates its building type, year of construction, construction method, and energy efficiency class. Based on this information, the software identifies a suitable building archetype and calculates which materials were likely used in its construction.

Software

• Steven Hooper has built BadCaddie, an app that uses OpenStreetMap golf-course data for course discovery and hole maps, alongside GNSS yardages, scorekeeping, and club suggestions, based on recorded shot distances. It is available for iPhone with an Apple Watch companion and as a plugin for Even Realities G2 glasses.
• Ian Wagner explained how Stadia Maps has been taking a fresh look at the cartographic decisions at every level of their map stack. Their recent water layer changes and water label updates have made a visible difference to the Stamen Terrain style.
• Tina reported that OsmAnd now allows users to colour their tracks based on speed, altitude, or slope data. Custom colour palettes help turn complex GPX data into clear, meaningful visual stories.

Releases

• The CoMaps team has released version 2026.08.31, which is now out across all release channels. New features include the display of reviews from Mangrove Reviews and a new transport modes UI on iOS.
• The OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers have prepared version 6.1.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet. Christoph Hormann detailed the visible changes introduced by this release in an OSM diary post.

Other “geo” things

• TechCrunch reported that Tern has won a contract from the US Army to deploy its low-cost GNSS alternative technology. The US$11.26 million contract will see the Army use Tern’s navigation technology in vehicles. According to its official website, Tern is developing a positioning system that does not rely on satellites, signals, or external infrastructure. It has been tested by the US Departments of Transportation and Defense.
• ABC Science’s Julian O’Shea explored how Australia has been mapped ‘wrong’ from a 1547 world map to modern GPS.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	Kiel	Kieler Innovations- und Technologiezentrum	OSM auf der Kielux 2026	2026-09-18 – 2026-09-19
	Mumbai	Lokhandwala Garden, Andheri	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.14 (Andheri)	2026-09-19
	Delhi	Too Mikkii Tapas, South Extension	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.31 (South Extension)	2026-09-20
	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-22
	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-09-22
	Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #79	2026-09-22
	Catania	Piazza Roma, Catania (Punto di incontro)	Mappiamo le piste ciclabili – Catania	2026-09-22
		Building 4A, First Floor – Politecnico di Milano	PoliMappers Maptedì	2026-09-23
	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la carte à la carte !	2026-09-23
	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-09-23
	Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-09-23
	City of Westminster	Blue Posts pub	London pub meet-up	2026-09-23
			Pravidelný Missing Maps CZ-SK online Mapathon	2026-09-24
		100% online	Lançamento de livros sobre mapeamento colaborativo	2026-09-24
	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12 a, Freiburg/Br.	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Br.	2026-09-24
	Bengaluru	NIMHANS Convention Center	OSM India @ IndiaFOSS 2026	2026-09-25 – 2026-09-27
			UN Mappers Mappy Hour	2026-09-25
	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Conferencia “OpenStreetMap: Datos abiertos y más”	2026-09-25
	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Taller “Mapeando mi entorno”	2026-09-25
	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-09-25
	Karlsruhe	Geofabrik, Amalienstraße 44, 76133 Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2026	2026-09-26 – 2026-09-27
	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la balade de la data	2026-09-26
			Sudan Solidarity Series	2026-09-26
	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-09-27
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-28
	Magdeburg	Netz39 e.V. , Leibnizstraße 32, 39104 Magdeburg	4. OSM Stammtisch Magdeburg	2026-09-29
	Palo Alto	Startup Island Taiwan	South Bay Wiki and OpenStreetMap Meetup	2026-09-29
	Mannheim	RaumZeitLabor, Mannheim	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-09-30
	Angers	L’Arrière Train, 3 rue de Frémur, Angers	Angers Rencontre mensuelle OpenStreetMap	2026-10-01
		Bar Le Schmilblik	Rencontre mensuelle des contributeurs Paris sud	2026-10-01
	Messina	Fablab Messina (via Croce Rossa 63, 98124 Messina)	Hackathon Wikimedia & OSM	2026-10-02 – 2026-10-04
	Essen	Linuxhotel Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen Nr. 26 im Linuxhotel	2026-10-02 – 2026-10-04
	Langreo	Casa de la Cultura “Escuelas Dorado”	GeoCamp 2026	2026-10-03
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-10-03
	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-10-03
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #93	2026-10-05

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, HeiGIT, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

I build Tisseur de Voies, a site that computes loops where you ride one way and take the train back. Heritage railways fit that model well, because many of them carry bikes for free in a dedicated van, where regular regional trains count them. Trying to use them, I found the same situation almost everywhere: the tracks are in OSM, the service line is not. A data consumer sees a railway, with no way to tell that a train runs on it, where it stops, or who operates it. So I started adding them, one line at a time.

What I have contributed so far:

• Le Mastrou, Ardèche, 10 August (changeset 187233238): two route=train relations, one per direction, plus their route_master.
• Velay Express, Haute-Loire, 12 August (changeset 187362618): the same, with bicycle=limited on both directions.
• Chemin de Fer de la Baie de Somme, 19 September (changeset 189261499). Here two relations already existed, but as route=railway, with from and to swapped with respect to the geometry. I retagged them route=train, named them after the operator’s own routes, and filled in operator.
• Le Grand Large, the same day (changeset 189262951), the creation behind my first question.

1. One journey sold end to end, but two trains and a 200 m walk

The Chemin de Fer de la Baie de Somme sells three journeys on its metre-gauge network: « Entre Terre et Prés-Salés » between Le Crotoy and Saint-Valery, « Les Bas-Champs » between Saint-Valery and Cayeux-sur-Mer, and « Le Grand Large », Le Crotoy to Cayeux in 1 h 35. The third one combines the other two, and the change happens at Saint-Valery between two stations two hundred metres apart, on foot.

I mapped it as a third route=train relation. Its ways form a continuous chain from end to end, since the track does link the two Saint-Valery stations (I added the sixty metres that were missing along the quay), and yet no single train runs the whole thing. That is what bothers me, and I would rather raise it than let someone find it.

A route_master grouping the two short journeys would match what the trains actually run, at the cost of losing the single ticketed, timetabled journey that exists end to end. Leaving it out of OSM entirely hides the only itinerary that crosses the whole network. How do you handle this elsewhere, a walking transfer inside a single commercial product?

2. Declared stops, when the station node sits away from the track

On these lines, some stations are mapped as a railway=station node on the station building, a few dozen metres from the rails. Anyone looking for stops by walking the nodes of the member ways misses them. That is exactly what happened to me on Velay Express, where Saint-Agrève, the end of the line that matters most for a loop, was nowhere to be found.

So I listed the stations as role=stop members of the relation, including those whose node is off the track. The list becomes explicit, and a data consumer no longer has to infer it from topology. This departs from the letter of PTv2, where role=stop expects a public_transport=stop_position on the way, these relations being tagged public_transport:version=1. On a heritage line, should I also add a stop_position on the track facing each building, or is the declared list enough?

What it adds up to

These four changesets show up directly in the data I publish: four bike loops with a heritage-train return, on Tisseur de Voies. The Baie de Somme one, 29 kilometres of which 28 on signed cycle routes, did not exist before the 19 September relation. Alignments and stations come from OSM, the cycle routes from OSM and the French national reference.

Corrections welcome, including on the first point. If the right answer is to delete the « Le Grand Large » relation, I will delete it.

Nicolas

Je construis Tisseur de Voies, un site qui calcule des boucles où l’on part à vélo et où l’on rentre en train. Les lignes touristiques m’intéressent pour une raison simple : beaucoup embarquent les vélos gratuitement, dans un fourgon prévu pour ça, là où le TER les compte. En cherchant à les exploiter, j’ai trouvé la même situation presque partout. Les rails sont dans OSM, la ligne de service n’y est pas. Un consommateur de données voit une voie ferrée, sans savoir qu’un train circule dessus, ni où il s’arrête, ni qui l’exploite. J’ai donc commencé à les ajouter, une ligne à la fois.

Ce que j’ai contribué jusqu’ici :

• Le Mastrou, en Ardèche, le 10 août (changeset 187233238) : deux relations route=train, une par sens, et leur route_master.
• Velay Express, en Haute-Loire, le 12 août (changeset 187362618) : le même geste, avec bicycle=limited sur les deux sens.
• Chemin de Fer de la Baie de Somme, le 19 septembre (changeset 189261499). Là, deux relations existaient déjà, mais en route=railway, avec des from et to inversés par rapport à la géométrie. Je les ai passées en route=train, renommées avec les noms que l’exploitant donne à ses parcours, et j’ai renseigné operator.
• Le Grand Large, le même jour (changeset 189262951), la création qui pose ma première question.

1. Un parcours vendu de bout en bout, mais deux trains et 200 mètres à pied

Le Chemin de Fer de la Baie de Somme vend trois parcours sur son réseau métrique : « Entre Terre et Prés-Salés » entre Le Crotoy et Saint-Valery, « Les Bas-Champs » entre Saint-Valery et Cayeux-sur-Mer, et « Le Grand Large » qui relie Le Crotoy à Cayeux en 1 h 35. Ce troisième parcours cumule les deux autres, et le changement se fait à Saint-Valery entre deux gares distantes de deux cents mètres, que l’on franchit à pied.

J’en ai fait une troisième relation route=train. Ses ways forment une chaîne continue d’un bout à l’autre, la voie reliant bien les deux gares de Saint-Valery (j’ai complété les soixante mètres qui manquaient le long du quai), et pourtant aucun train ne la parcourt d’un seul trait. C’est le point qui me gêne, et je préfère le poser ici plutôt que de le laisser se découvrir.

Un route_master regroupant les deux parcours courts collerait mieux à ce que roulent les trains, au prix du trajet vendu, horairé et chronométré de bout en bout, qui disparaîtrait des données. À l’inverse, laisser ce troisième parcours hors d’OSM rend invisible le seul itinéraire qui traverse le réseau entier. Comment traitez-vous ce cas ailleurs, une correspondance à pied à l’intérieur d’un produit commercial unique ?

2. Des arrêts déclarés, quand la gare est en retrait de la voie

Sur ces lignes, une partie des gares est mappée en nœud railway=station posé sur le bâtiment voyageurs, à quelques dizaines de mètres des rails. Qui cherche les arrêts en parcourant les nœuds des ways membres passe à côté. C’est exactement ce qui m’est arrivé sur Velay Express, où la gare de Saint-Agrève, le bout de ligne le plus utile pour une boucle, manquait à l’appel.

J’ai donc listé les gares en membres role=stop de la relation, y compris celles dont le nœud est en dehors de la voie. La liste devient explicite, et un réutilisateur n’a plus à la deviner par topologie. Cela s’écarte de la lettre de PTv2, où role=stop attend un public_transport=stop_position posé sur la voie, ces relations étant d’ailleurs en public_transport:version=1. Faut-il, sur une ligne touristique, poser en plus un stop_position face à chaque bâtiment, ou la liste déclarée suffit-elle ?

Ce que ça donne à l’arrivée

Ces quatre changesets se lisent directement dans les données que je publie : quatre boucles vélo avec retour en train touristique, sur Tisseur de Voies. Celle de la baie de Somme, 29 kilomètres dont 28 sur voie balisée, n’existait pas avant la relation du 19 septembre. Les tracés et les gares viennent d’OSM, les véloroutes d’OSM et du référentiel national.

Je prends volontiers les corrections, y compris sur le premier point. Si la bonne réponse est de supprimer la relation « Le Grand Large », je la supprimerai.

Nicolas

This is mostly a test post to see how the blog feature works. If you are reading this, hello.

I’ve recently resumed contributing, and have transitioned from focusing on Paola, KS to Lawrence, KS. This is a move I hope to also make in real life in early 2027; until then it will mostly be working off of Esri aerial imagery and mapillary street level photos.

Once moved I’ll be able to survey things properly, and in the medium term after that the hope is also to start to capture 360 camera imagery by bicycle. I don’t have one due to price and the fact that I couldn’t justify one when mapping Paola.

Things that have caught my interest: - Adding parking downtown - Seeing if I like micro mapping things like land use. (will probably do this as a palette cleanser between working on other groupings of tasks) - Adding crossing ways to the bike paths instead of just nodes - Finding bicycle parking and repair stands - Trolling around finding new cycleways on the roads (the city seems to have added a lot of sharrows since the last time someone did this)

The bike route signage situation on the ground is a bit unclear. In some areas the mapillary coverage is good enough to start to tackle that now. In lower traffic areas it will probably be necessary to be in the area to handle properly. Bicycle route relations exist for the area, but seem to have been done by several people and don’t have a coherent style. Making them consistent will likely be a long term project that will require actually having the local network already in my head.

Log 1

7:00 PM 19/08/2026

Beginning of Aubin Grove Development. Preview of my home-suburb on the OSM map provides little to no information of locations and landmarks. Using memory of my previous home when I was a child, I was able to remember parts of the house people wouldn’t be able to see on a map very easily with the low-resolution satellite imagery. House address 12 Cape Le Grand Avenue is added for the first marked residential building in Aubin Grove.

Locating my original Primary School, Aubin Grove Primary School, was easy from memory. I noticed multiple discrepancies and immediately improved to location. All discrepancies were fixed and possibly more zones will be added in the future logs.

Every single driveway and sidewalk connection on every road beginning with A has been done. 17 of… 602. AGH.

Fucking diaries? Hell yeah. Anyways, I wanna clean my town up. Driveways and sidewalks are woefully unmapped… I have little idea what I’m doing on a styleguide level. Stared at the wiki, learned a little bit of Overpass to pull up a list of every road in town, and now I’m just alphabetically working through it all…

Una de las opciones que probé fue la actualización de ubicación, e muy precisa

New here, but excited to help. I’ve been using StreetComplete on my commute to help get some things updated and cleaned up here in Vermont

Moc prosím: když někdo mění názvy nějakého objektu, přeneste starý název do old_name. Ať už je to jméno budovy, ulice nebo zastávky MHD.

Je úplně úžasné, když existuje místo, které plní i funkci “historického překladače”. Když mluvíte se starousedlíkem, který vás posílá na Tesco u tramvaje “Zahrádky”, ale v ostatních mapách nic takového není, protože zastávka byla přejmenována na “Třebovice, OC”. Nebo když starousedlíci mluví o “Bachnerovi”, protože “Prior Horník” se vždy tak nějak pletl s “Prior Úderník” o dvě ulice vedle a s “Prior Hutník” o tři ulice a náměstí vedle. Dneska je tam “Bang Bang” a kdo ví, co to bude za rok.

Zejména na budově Sokolská 1, Ostrava je vidět význam této položky, když 80-letý řekne “Ander” nebo “ASO”, 50-letý něco jako “Starý Prior u Masarykáče, chvilku to bylo taky Laso”, 30-letý “stará VZP” a pro mladší je to prostě “ten barák jak se tam čeká na zastávce Sýkorák, dole se střídají různé sekáče s hadrama a je tam dost nachcáno”. A ano, všechny ty názvy jsou živé.

Najít stránku, kde je toto vše zdokumentováno, zabralo docela dost času a pro neznalé by byl problém si ji zase naopak spojit s konkrétními souřadnicemi… to je obecně podivný neduh různých historických stránek o architektuře, že neuvádějí souřadnice. A OSM má díky old_name unikátní vlastnost historii a souřadnice propojit.

He verificado la vía Guayas 129 en Puerto Engabao, Punta de Piedra. Confirmo su recorrido y coordenadas. Todo coincide con lo que se ve en el terreno.

Impetus

Many routers, such as OSRM,¹ set penalties for barriers like traffic lights or at-grade crossings, to estimate time lost at these points. For intersections with traffic lights, the standard procedure is to put a tag of highway=traffic_light at the intersecting node. For divided highway intersections, common practice is to tag each intersecting node also.

This quickly adds up to excess penalty for the simple router.² On a cross-traffic turn (left turns in the United States), this will lead the router to count three penalties per intersection. But, time spent at these intersections is not near three times the normal intersection, especially considering a cross-traffic turn often has first priority and protected access along divided highways.

The more-detailed method of tagging removes the unnecessary penalties. Instead of tagging highway=traffic_light at every intersection, a node is placed at every stop line to the intersection.

Now, in every road-legal path, the route will pass through only one traffic light node, with the following tags:

OSM highway = traffic_light traffic_light = signal traffic_light:direction = forward/backward

The directionality tag is not necessary on one-way segments, but it is better to keep explicit and consistent with two-way segments.

Although this tagging is ideal, it would be intensive for mappers to correct every intersection like this. An intersection of two undivided highways, for instance, need not be updated, since the node graph already adds only one traffic light penalty. But any intersection with at least one divided highway has a route that will pass through multiple intersecting nodes.

To prioritize the routes most in-need of review, I searched for intersections likely to accumulate the most delay from these penalties. The first method analyzed high-volume roadways, and the second analyzed intersections with the most accidents.

Highway traffic volume

My first method was to look at stretches of highway with the most annual average daily traffic (AADT). Due to being high volume, these roads are likely to be divided, and are also guaranteed to have vehicles passing through key intersections (resulting in lots of total excess penalty).

I downloaded the 2026 data on AADT from IDOT’s webpage.³ I removed all motorways without traffic lights and filtered the data for segments in Chicagoland with an AADT over 40,000 vehicles per day (sorted by distance from downtown), returning the following short list:

• Cicero Ave (Ogden–87th),
• Harlem (Stevenson–50th),
• First Ave (Ogden–Stevenson),
• North Ave (Mannheim–1st),
• Mannheim Ave (I-194–Butterfield),
• 87th St (Roberts–Central),
• La Grange Rd (143rd–191st),
• Roosevelt Rd (Meyers–I 294),
• Kingery Ave (Touhy–Stevenson),
• Butterfield Rd (Veterans Tlwy–22nd),
• North Ave (Gary–Kingery),
• and a few small sections of road between Elgin and Addison)

I reviewed every intersection on these segments for divided highways, and tagged appropriately.

Intersection crashes

The second method was to analyze which intersections them receive the most crashes per year. By itself, an intersection with many crashes indicates that drivers already have some difficulty in navigating the roadway, so the extra detail is doubly appropriate.

IDOT also maintains a database of vehicle crash data by year.⁴ Based on the 2025 data, I found 70,287 intersection-related crashes in Chicagoland, out of 300,000 total crashes in Illinois. I clustered the individual crashes to a radius of 400 feet (the average length of a block in Chicago). Below is a table with the most total crashes, as well as their neighborhood.

The cluster radius of 400 feet turned out to be too large to analyze individual intersections, but it was still useful for generating high-crash areas.

• Ohio Street off-ramp (Kennedy–LSD)
• Michigan Ave (LSD–Balbo)
• Ida B. Wells Dr
• Roosevelt (Halsted–LSD)
• Stony Island Ave (71st–Bishop Ford)

All of these stretches were reviewed for special traffic lights via CookOrtho2025 imagery, licensed from NearMaps.

1. Project OSRM, OSRM Backend, “penalty.feature.” ↩

2. I could not find a router which clusters close-together traffic lights into one. Either way, explicit tagging is better for all routing purposes, at the cost of being less clear for network maps. ↩

3. Illinois Department of Transportation, Annual Average Daily Traffic, 2026. ↩

4. Illinois Department of Transportation, Crashes - 2025. ↩

I run cyclists.com, a library of cycling routes. Every route page tries to answer what a rider wants to know before setting off: how much of it is on busy roads, whether it is paved, where the water and cafés are. Nearly all of those answers come from OpenStreetMap, so I wanted to explain how we use the data and pass back a few things we found in it.

What we measure along a route

We don’t use Overpass. A few hundred routes would be unfair load on a public instance, so everything runs against local Geofabrik extracts. For each route line we sample a point every 100 m, take the nearest way within 80 m and read its tags:

• Road class: highway=* grouped into cycle path, quiet street, minor road, main road (primary/secondary), major road (trunk) and motorway.
• Cycle provision: highway=cycleway, any cycleway*=* tag that isn’t no, or bicycle_road=yes.
• “Main roads without a cycle lane”: km on primary, secondary, trunk or motorway ways with none of the above.
• Fast roads: km where maxspeed is 80 km/h or more (mph converted).
• Surface: surface=* first; then tracktype; then the road class (a primary road with no surface tag counts as paved, a track as unpaved). Anything else is shown as “no data” rather than guessed.
• Services: cafés, bakeries, shops, drinking water, toilets, bike shops and railway stations within a few hundred metres of the line, placed by km along the route, plus the longest stretch with none.

Where a sample point is more than 80 m from any way, it counts as unmapped. We say so on the page instead of filling the gap.

A typical result, for a loop in the Hajar mountains above Fujairah: “Most of it (42.6 km) is on main roads without a cycle lane, 16.4 km where the limit is 80 km/h or more. The first 30 km has no café, shop or water.” And for the Deeside Way out of Aberdeen: “62% is on cycle paths or roads with a cycle lane. 52% is mapped as paved and 47% as gravel or unpaved.”

Elevation comes from the Copernicus DEM, not from OSM or from the GPS.

Signed cycle routes as route pages

In Scotland and Wales we turned every route=bicycle relation into route pages: 177 sections in Scotland, 68 in Wales, each with a GPX file. Long routes are cut at towns into stages, so the Border Loop is a four-day tour. Ferries stay in the line but end a stage.

The lesson: don’t chain a relation’s members in order. That broke at every one-way split and dual carriageway. It worked once we read each relation as a network instead:

• snap way ends to junctions within 50 m
• ride around roundabouts rather than along them
• prune dead-end spurs under 2 km
• bridge small breaks of up to 500 m once
• take the longest path through what is left

The surface split comes from the member ways’ own tags.

Relations we couldn’t read

These are the ones worth a look if you map in Scotland or Wales. Paste the number into the search box (e.g. r11361). I’m not saying they’re wrong: some may be deliberate, and I haven’t checked each on the ground.

Fragmented (members don’t join into a rideable line):

• NCN 73 (r11361) and NCN 753 (r2293737). My guess is that the ferry crossings aren’t members, so the island and mainland sections don’t connect.
• NCN 776 (r105443), NCN 83 (r1328554), NCN 1: Loch Leven to Dundee (r15978437), EuroVelo 12 in Scotland (r9476219)
• Radnor Ring (r32882), NCN 47 (r8201445), Rhondda Fawr Community Route (r8281902)

No name or ref, so we couldn’t tell riders what the route is (Scotland): r5497214, r10023468, r10023578, r10023686, r13317477, r15979588, r20395370

Generic names with no ref: “National Cycle Network National Route” (r116667), “National Cycle Network Route” (r1662719), “National Cycle Network” (r2810169), and one named just “885” (r2454549).

Two limits on our side rather than in the data. Routes that cross into England were cut off at the edge of the country extract. And a figure-of-eight route that rides one segment twice (the Gallovidian Gravel) comes out as one loop, because we don’t yet read a route that uses a way twice.

Attribution

All of this is © OpenStreetMap contributors under the ODbL, credited on every page. Thank you to everyone who tagged a surface, a speed limit or a café somewhere remote. It changes what we can tell a rider about a road they’ve never seen.

If a route page describes your area wrongly, every page has a “Let us know” link at the bottom, and I read them.

I run cyclists.com, a library of cycling routes. Every route page tries to answer what a rider wants to know before setting off: how much of it is on busy roads, whether it is paved, where the water and cafés are. Nearly all of those answers come from OpenStreetMap, so I wanted to explain how we use the data and pass back a few things we found in it.

What we measure along a route

We don’t use Overpass. A few hundred routes would be unfair load on a public instance, so everything runs against local Geofabrik extracts. For each route line we sample a point every 100 m, take the nearest way within 80 m and read its tags:

• Road class: highway=* grouped into cycle path, quiet street, minor road, main road (primary/secondary), major road (trunk) and motorway.
• Cycle provision: highway=cycleway, any cycleway*=* tag that isn’t no, or bicycle_road=yes.
• “Main roads without a cycle lane”: km on primary, secondary, trunk or motorway ways with none of the above.
• Fast roads: km where maxspeed is 80 km/h or more (mph converted).
• Surface: surface=* first; then tracktype; then the road class (a primary road with no surface tag counts as paved, a track as unpaved). Anything else is shown as “no data” rather than guessed.
• Services: cafés, bakeries, shops, drinking water, toilets, bike shops and railway stations within a few hundred metres of the line, placed by km along the route, plus the longest stretch with none.

Where a sample point is more than 80 m from any way, it counts as unmapped. We say so on the page instead of filling the gap.

A typical result, for a loop in the Hajar mountains (Fujairah Loop via Fayyad and Minazif): “Most of it (42.6 km) is on main roads without a cycle lane, 16.4 km where the limit is 80 km/h or more. The first 30 km has no café, shop or water.” And for the Deeside Way out of Aberdeen: “62% is on cycle paths or roads with a cycle lane. 52% is mapped as paved and 47% as gravel or unpaved.”

Elevation comes from the Copernicus DEM, not from OSM or from the GPS.

Signed cycle routes as route pages

In Scotland and Wales we turned every route=bicycle relation into route pages: 177 sections in Scotland, 68 in Wales, each with a GPX file. Long routes are cut at towns into stages, so the Border Loop is a four-day tour. Ferries stay in the line but end a stage (Oban to Corran finishes at the Corran ferry).

The lesson: don’t chain a relation’s members in order. That broke at every one-way split and dual carriageway. It worked once we read each relation as a network instead: - snap way ends to junctions within 50 m - ride around roundabouts rather than along them - prune dead-end spurs under 2 km - bridge small breaks of up to 500 m once - take the longest path through what is left

The surface split comes from the member ways’ own tags.

Relations we couldn’t read

These are the ones worth a look if you map in Scotland or Wales. I’m not saying they’re wrong: some may be deliberate, and I haven’t checked each on the ground.

Fragmented (members don’t join into a rideable line): - NCN 73 (r11361) and NCN 753 (r2293737). My guess is that the ferry crossings aren’t members, so the island and mainland sections don’t connect. - NCN 776 (r105443), NCN 83 (r1328554), NCN 1: Loch Leven to Dundee (r15978437), EuroVelo 12 in Scotland (r9476219) - Radnor Ring (r32882), NCN 47 (r8201445), Rhondda Fawr Community Route (r8281902)

No name or ref, so we couldn’t tell riders what the route is: - Scotland: r5497214, r10023468, r10023578, r10023686, r13317477, r15979588, r20395370

Generic names with no ref, e.g. “National Cycle Network National Route” (r116667), “National Cycle Network Route” (r1662719), “National Cycle Network” (r2810169), and one named just “885” (r2454549).

Two limits on our side rather than in the data. Routes that cross into England were cut off at the edge of the country extract. And a figure-of-eight route that rides one segment twice (the Gallovidian Gravel) comes out as one loop, because we don’t yet read a route that uses a way twice.

Attribution

All of this is © OpenStreetMap contributors under the ODbL, credited on every page. Thank you to everyone who tagged a surface, a speed limit or a café somewhere remote. It changes what we can tell a rider about a road they’ve never seen.

If you spot a route page that describes your area wrongly, every page has a “Let us know” link at the bottom, and I read them.

Also Vater kenne ich das Problem: Wo ist die nächste Wickelmöglichkeit? Welcher Spielplatz hat eine Schaukel? Welches Café hat eine Spielecke? Darum habe ich kinderfreundlicheorte.de gebaut – eine Karte familienfreundlicher Orte, komplett basierend auf OpenStreetMap-Daten.

Stand heute:

• Deutschland: 149.182 Orte
• Österreich: 13.482, Schweiz: 16.096, Liechtenstein: 95, Luxemburg: 1.538, Südtirol: 1.208

Die Pipeline fasst Spielplatzgeräte (Schaukeln, Rutschen, Wippen) mit ihrem Spielplatz zusammen, indiziert u.a. changing_table, kids_area, highchair und Besucher können Ausstattung über „Ausstattung melden” nachtragen – geprüfte Meldungen wandern per OSM-API zurück in die Datenbank.

Meine Bitte an die Community: Wenn ihr mappt, tragt changing_table, kids_area oder Spielplatzgeräte ein, wo ihr sie seht. Ich hab selbst damit angefangen. Kleine Tags, große Wirkung für Eltern!

Hinweis: Die Seite ist derzeit nur auf Deutsch und deckt nur deutschsprachige Regionen ab (DE, AT, CH, LI, LU, Südtirol).