OpenStreetMap

Helmchen42's Diary Comments

Diary Comments added by Helmchen42

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Juno opens its GPS traces to aid in mapping New York City

Hi, I agree this is a great source for New York City and it would be a blessing if we had it for other cities in America and Europe (or elsewhere) as well.

Two things that I think could be improved: 1. Only using traces of the past two days is great to highlight recent changes, ad works well for streets that are often used by the drivers. There are however regions that are pretty sparse with streets that have not been used at all and others that were only used once. There changes might still go unnoticed for weeks or even months, or even worse a singular trace might be misinterpreted by any user to represent a fresh one way street. So for regions like around Juniper Valley Park or west of the Clearview Park golf course, a longer timeframe could be useful. Ideally both on the same tiles, one to two days in high density areas, one week or even a bit longer for suburbs with low usage.

  1. While the traces appear to be clean most of the time, there are some streets that appear (understandably)to be pretty rough - the south end of the Broadway for example. Since these are tiles - thus not raw data anyways - would it be feasible to smoothen them to a certain degree?

2.1. I also wanted to suggest that if there are enough traces in one place, that segments of traces that stray too far from the street as defined by the majority of the traces could be faded out, sharpening the depiction of a street/lane. As an example I would have named the FDR Drive but that very example is a good counter argument as different streets nearby, namely the South Street could easily cause a lot of problems for that.