Construction Feature

With regard to driving around signs: The area has houses and in some discussion groups on hiking in the area said since people that live there were driving around signs, people figured it was okay. When I drove through it there were exactly zero signs of construction or any hazard. I inferred the signs were indicating they didn't want it being used for through traffic and not trying to preclude someone getting to a destination inside the area. So you see if makes a difference how you define "closed".

With regard to updating the status: I don't know the open street map process well. But if I were designing a system which allowed people to put temporal features on permanent objects, I would implement some kind of timeout. Where the feature was removed or someone was notified after some time. I was asking if there is such a capability.

With regard to "so thank you for volunteering to have a look up here and see which bits are really open": I put in a comment several weeks ago asking about this. Since I don't drive this route regularly it seems like I'm not the person to do this. I could make an update but then it would quickly become obsolete. I'm not the one that put the information there and don't want to get into a reversion war. If I knew OSM had a policy on how often to update temporal features or if/how these are monitored and there was some sort of coordinated effort, I'd be happy to be part of that coordinated team that drives by and provides periodic updates. Then again maybe OSM is relying on some external source for road closure information (for example CalTrans in California). Since I have no insight, I was just asking what could exist.

It's interesting that you mention this, by the way, because from time to time I run across marked trails that no longer exist. Sometimes they are just over grown and sometimes sometimes they are listed as areas where they are trying to reestablish the native habitat and the sign says this is no longer the trail. I've wondered if I should remove those. But then I have seen cases where a trail was badly overgrown after years of neglect but then some group comes along and completely clears the trail. So you just never and I'm reluctant to remove someone else's work.

With regard to: "Essentially it means that right now "none of it is usable as a road". Some OSM data consumers (the default settings for the map creatr for Garmin devices was one example) may allow some access, but it's questionable whether that's correct."

Thank you that's helpful. Since the three products I cite are all hiking or mountain biking maps I was wondering if a) OSM had recommendations on how to handle features b) they hand recommendations for particularly use cases.

As user:SomeoneElse pointed out, the best way to handle this is for an interested mapper to make changes in status as the work proceeds. I have done that in the past for a big highway near me and because I also make my own Garmin compatible maps, I had extra motivation to keep OSM current. OSM itself makes no recommendations about these situations because any such effort is always decided by the volunteers.

Since most map creators don't release updates every day, their information will necessarily lag behind the actual situation on the ground but that's better than making it seem as though the road had disappeared.