I joined this site due to cycling. My tracking app (Strava) uses Open Street Maps. One of my cycling goals was to ride every street in my city, which is difficult enough without mapping errors. I kept seeing “roads” on this map that are in reality private driveways, “public” roads that are actually private, and some roads that exist in reality but aren’t on the map yet. (And in one case, a road on the map that has never existed in reality.)
I haven’t yet figured out how to accurately add missing roads, but I’m trying to make the map better by correcting these other features.
Discussion
Comment from _Jesse on 21 June 2026 at 20:13
I also ran into this at first and noticed that it was due to TIGER imports from ~18 years ago.
Apparently, these imports were from government GIS databases that didn’t always just includes roads and paths meant for transportation, but also planned/approved roads that never actually were created (i see this today, for example, with a planned foot traffic bridge that has been routable in garmin for 3 years and isn’t yet completed), old logging roads, or tracks that were miscategorized during automatic categorization on import.
I’ve corrected my share of them. and i’ve also gone through and corrected surfaces as accurately as i could around my area as a lot of my friends use OSM sourced maps to create cycling plans (such as ride with gps or garmin).
Sadly, i think the reality is that a large complex mapping project like this isn’t going to be very accurate without absolutely massive work and that’s harder to get in more rural areas especially.
At any rate, enjoy the journey, find the best routes, and try to label things where cycling is disallowed or private drives correctly for the sake of the landowners or public lands.
Comment from Marcos Dione on 22 June 2026 at 14:46
As I understand it, the TIGER import was a disaster, but at least it triggered (!!!) the creation of the osm.wiki/Import/Guidelines . See also osm.wiki/TIGER_fixup
Comment from _Jesse on 22 June 2026 at 15:26
Ah, thanks, Marcos.
Looking at that I think it may make sense for me to make sure that when i review a road in my area and know it to be accurate, I remove the TIGER:reviewed tag if there are no other TIGER tags.
One thing i don’t verify is road geometry. I’ll keep an eye out for road geometry problems. My GPS devices are always set to multi-band, so they’re accurate enough to see if a road geometry is wrong or at least i could do a confirmatory check.
Unfortunately doing a quick glance at Garmin’s maps vs OSM maps it looks like on the web interface garmin is mostly using google map data, so a section where i identified that the map geometry was wrong actually looked fine in OSM when i imported the GPS track.
I think the bike computer itself has OSM data as i’ve noticed that road names disagree sometimes between the garmin computer and web interface and they need to be corrected in OSM.
Comment from ChanFry on 22 June 2026 at 15:46
Thanks for the comments. One thing I hope to help with in the future is new housing developments. My (mid-sized) city has at least 10 ongoing large subdivisions, parts of which haven’t been added to the map yet. I cycled one a couple of weeks ago, and half its roads weren’t on OSM or Google maps yet.
But I don’t want to add the new roads incorrectly, so I’ll wait until I’m certain I know the coordinates before adding something. In the meantime, I’ll correct small details like non-existent roads, private/public designations, paved/unpaved, etc.
Comment from FajrAl on 28 June 2026 at 13:55
the Strava Heatmap browser extension is useful for adding unmapped trail
Comment from _Jesse on 29 June 2026 at 13:28
You definitely have to be a little careful with that as people record rides on private land, etc as well.
Comment from Marcos Dione on 30 June 2026 at 04:22
If you have a GPX, you can use that as a base to start mapping. Street names and other details can come later :)
Comment from ChanFry on 30 June 2026 at 11:51
Thanks, Marcos. I think I know how to get my .gpx files from Strava. Now I’ll figure out how to use those coordinates to add streets in OSM.
Comment from Marcos Dione on 4 July 2026 at 11:48
If you’re using Strava, this might interest you :)
osm.wiki/Strava#Data_Permission_-_Allowed_for_tracing!