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What are your best practices or ideas how to prepare to map destination signs (and traffic signs) on a drive by car / bus (of course not being the driver)? Any way to get the already existing map data for destination (and traffic signs) into an app, to not "field note" them unnecessarily? For POIs OosmAnd e.g. would show them, but not these ones...

asked 22 Sep '17, 21:40

geohobbes's gravatar image

geohobbes
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accept rate: 33%


Some people use Vespucci and apparently you can download the area of interest prior to your outing so you don't need to waste your mobile data plan.

I often use OsmTracker for which I've set up a custom button set that simply has quick action buttons for speed limits, stop signs, and traffic lights. Pretty easy to use the GPX tracks in JOSM to spot the places that speed limits change, etc.

But recently I've found that I just pull the microSD card out of my GPS enabled dash camera and fast forward through the videos. When I see something of interest (bus stop, bench, traffic lights, speed limit signs, destination signs, stores, etc.) I use the lat/lon on the video to zoom to the location using JOSM, verify the imagery matches what I expect, and then add or update the objects in OSM. A down side to this is the dash cam is only looking forward and there is an amazing amount of stuff that just doesn't show up like you might expect (like many shop name signs). We recently took a two day holiday into the local mountains covering about 300 KM and it took me maybe 4 hours to do all the OSM editing afterward. One reason it was so slow to map was that the route relations for several of the highways we took were in sad shape. In addition to actually fixing the areas that should have been dual carriageways it took me a while to get the route relations fixed up.

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answered 22 Sep '17, 23:27

n76's gravatar image

n76
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accept rate: 17%

edited 22 Sep '17, 23:29

Another possibility is to use the Mapillary app and your GPS-enabled smartphone. You can turn the app on whenever approaching a ramp and capture a series of geotagged photos of the signs with destinations, etc. These can be inspected later and the relevant information extracted after uploading to the Mapillary website. The nice thing about this approach is that the photos are there for others to see and extract details you may have missed or were uninterested in recording, sort of like Google Streetview

I usually resort to shooting photos of such signs with my point and shoot camera and then correlating them with my GPS track from the trip in JOSM. I find this approach works best for me.

(23 Sep '17, 00:08) AlaskaDave

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question asked: 22 Sep '17, 21:40

question was seen: 2,243 times

last updated: 23 Sep '17, 00:08

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum