Thanks, Trigpoint. I’ve lived in Shropshire for a few years, and indeed grew up in South Shropshire. Just moved from Pontesbury to Newport (so only just in Shropshire!).

I hadn’t realised the effort that went into achieving these things, but I’m not surprised, I suppose. Developers will get away with what they can. Most of these are high fenced alleys, but still better than having to follow the silly, wibbly, wobbly roads, and good for residents when they link up with the cul de sacs.

Thanks :-)

Heavens! That would mean going near a m-m-m-m-mailing list. Gave up on them a long time ago.

But in essence, iD makes these cycle route relations easy in the context I was using them, because it detects relations that nearby ways are part of, and allows you to just select them to add the selected way to the relation. (You can reference this comment in you posts if you wish.)

By the way, I am impressed with iD because it makes pain-in-the-derriere relations easier than other editors do - they are still the most difficult bit of OSM editing for beginners (even in iD).

Not sure I am qualified to comment on route=road. In the UK context, this really is pretty pointless because of the way our road numbering works. But that may not be the case in other countries.

Most mapping aims to improve a specific geographic area. And quite a lot of it is aimed towards specific uses (which is why OSM probably has more complete cycle lane, but less complete speed limit data than other data sets in many areas). There is a website for doing this: osm.org !

In terms of asking for improvements, I think you have to take into account people’s motivations for working on OSM. Trying to co-ordinate mappers is like herding cats (actually more difficult than that), unless their motivation is the same as yours. HOT is probably the single example of successful co-ordination on a large scale, and that is surely precisely because HOT as a body, humanitarian mappers and humanitarian data consumers have the same motivation (or at least significant cross-over in motivation).

I am not convinced a web site where companies could ask for improvements would be very successful in most cases. If a company says: “we want to have great data for our self-driving cars”, what is the motivation for mappers to do less of the mapping they enjoy and focus more on what fits that requirement? It has been made argued again and again that OSM would be more useful for commerical uses with more complete address data, and yet so far no one has cracked how to motivate us all to do much of it. Motivation is the key.

I think the idea of paid contribution does make some people queasy. One debate on the topic is here:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2013-November/002352.html

Thanks very much for continuing to invest your time in Potlatch 2, Richard. I can certainly see myself making use of the “floating window” option.