We created a new MapRoulette challenge over at Telenav: Crossing Ways. As always with the Telenav-generated challenges, this one is US only, because we currently only process OpenStreetMap data for the United States. We are working on extending support for other regions.

TL;DR –> On to MapRoulette!!

The Crossing Ways challenge is pretty straightforward and should make for an easy challenge for novice mappers looking for something to fix. It detects ways that cross, but neither way is tagged as a bridge or tunnel. Here is an example:

If you open this up in iD or JOSM, you will be able to tell the required resolution from the aerial imagery:

In this case, the ways should be connected as there is clearly an intersection. Another possibility is that there actually should be a bridge or tunnel tag on either of the ways.

In this particular case, you can see that there actually is a node at the intersection, but it does not connect both ways. In JOSM, it displays as a ‘skinny node’:

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In this case, you can use JOSM’s ‘Join’ function (shortcut ‘J’) to connect both ways. In iD, a node connecting two ways will be grey, and a regular node will be white:

If you use iD, you can just drag an existing node to the intersection to snap the two ways together, or drag a virtual node to the intersection to create a new intersection node. (Virtual nodes appear between two existing nodes and allow you to quickly create a new node on a way, an example shown below.)

There are currently around 19,000 cases in the US alone, so let’s get on fixing these annoying bugs in OSM!

On to MapRoulette!