OSM Inspector/Views/Highways

The Highways view in OSM Inspector shows problems with highway tags.

Overview

Highways (streets, roads, ...) are one of the most important features in OSM. This view helps finding problems on highways such as missing names, unusal highway types or wrong oneway tags.

Data sources

All data in this view is derived from OSM data.

Data for the whole world is available in this view.

The OSM data processing of this view is done by osmi_simple_views.

Layers

The layers are organized into three sections:

Highway types

There are about 20 highway types from highway=motorway to highway=path that are used often and properly documented. Some other types are used less frequently and/or are not documented. Some other highway types indicate incomplete or obsolete information.

The Unknown layer shows highways with unknown type. This isn't necessarily an error, but in many cases it is.

The layer From plan.at shows highway types from the plan.at import. These need to be fixed. See the plan.at view for more about this. This layer does no longer exist.

The Deprecated layer shows ways tagged with highway=minor and highway=unsurfaced. Those tag values are obsolete and should be replaced. See Deprecated_features. This layer was removed on 2017-06-19 because these tags do not exist any longer.

The layer highway=road shows ways tagged with highway=road. This indicates that the actual road type is unknown, for instance because it came from an aerial image. This is not an error, it just means that the information is incomplete and has to be added at some point.

Highway name/ref

This section is about name=* and ref=* tags.

The layer None (major roads) shows all ways tagged with a highway type of motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, or tertiary that have neither a name=* nor a ref=* tag. Most of the roads of these types should at least have a ref=*. Roundabouts and roundabout-like intersections (junction=roundabout/round) without name=* and ref=* are not shown.

The layer None (minor roads) shows all ways tagged with a highway type of residential, living_street, or pedestrian that have neither a name=* nor a ref=* tag. Most of the roads of these types should at least have a name. Roundabouts and roundabout-like intersections (junction=roundabout/round) without name=* and ref=* are not shown.

In some cases roads have been misclassified (often residential instead of unclassified or service) and the type should be corrected. Because this happens very often in the TIGER import, the ways tagged highway=residential coming from this import are not showing up in this view, there would be far too many cluttering up everything.

The Fixme layer shows highways with names such as fixme or unknown.

The Long ref layer shows highways whose ref=* has a value longer than 14 characters. Semicolons do not count. Usually, someone else wrote the value for another tag such as name=* or destination=* into ref=*.

Additional attributes

In this section problems with further attributes of roads are highlighted.

The Oneway layer shows ways tagged with oneway=* with an unknown value. Only the values yes (preferred), no, 1, -1, true, and false are recognized.

The Lanes layer shows ways tagged with lanes=* with unkown value. The value should be an integer between 1 and 9.

The Maxspeed layer shows ways tagged with maxspeed=* with unknown value. Only numbers, optionally with a suffix mph and some other often used values such as unlimited are recognized. Ways that show up here should probably be fixed to conform to some of the more common formats.

The Maxheight layer shows ways tagged with maxheight=* with unknown value. Some common formats with simple numbers (meaning its in meters) or feets and inches are recognized. Ways that show up here should probably be fixed to conform to some of the more common formats.

Relations with highway=*

This layer shows way members of relations with highway=* except multipolygon relations with highway=pedestrian/footway/service/services/rest_area. Apart from this whitelist, all other relations with highway=* can be considered as errors and require further investigation.

Non-operational ways

This section shows ways with highway=disused/abandoned/proposed/construction. The lifecycle prefixes are supported as well.

The Multiple lifecycle states layer shows ways which have more than one lifecycle state at the same time. For example, ways tagged both with highway=track and abandoned:highway=secondary.

The Tagging incomplete layer shows ways with highway=construction/proposed/disused/abandoned but lacking the supplementary specifying the road class. This is an error.

The Abandoned layer shows ways with highway=abandoned or abandoned:highway=*.

The Disused layer shows ways with highway=disused or disused:highway=*.

The Under construction layer shows ways with highway=construction or construction:highway=*

The Proposed layer shows ways with highway=proposed or proposed:highway=*.