Exit numbers and destinations on highways are an important aspect of navigation since they guide the user where do they have to exit the freeway in order to reach their destination and which other cities or towns or areas the highway interlinks. Making any map more navigable or any routing machine more accurate includes all the minute details and improvements. In an effort to broaden the reach of OpenStreetMap to the people and make it better in routing and guidance, we are adding exit and destination tags for highways in five priority cities of Canada.

The Approach:

We are concentrating on five major cities of Canada: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary to add the exit and destination tags and the method we intend to follow 👇🏻

• We are using tasking manager for loading the highways as a separate task and open it directly onto checkautopista2. Checkautopista2 by k1wi is a neat tool that highlights all the highways and their exits which makes it easier to add the exit and destination tags.

• You can get involved with the project and know about adding exits and destinations from the detailed workflow.

Here’s how you can get involved:

Adding exit and destination tags is based on good sources: Mapillary, local knowledge and official documents. You can contribute to this project of making one of Canada’s most detailed maps by contributing to:

• Mapillary coverage of the higways that would aid us in adding right destination tags.
• Adding exit and destinations to highways. Community participation has already ensured that around 1500 destination tags are added across Canada 👏🏻 🎉
• Validation of our edits. You being local mappers have more knowledge on the highways than us and it would be great to have your eyes on what we add.
• Refer to any other verifiable source like official documents, secondary sources which would help us in adding the missing tags.
• Suggesting on how better to improve our existing workflow

A few questions:

After an initial groundwork into the already mapped exit numbers and destinations, some observations are:

• We noticed that destination (places, cities) and destination:ref (highways) tags are being added to the nodes of exits as name tags.
• Few exit nodes have destinations given in the ref tag, instead of ways
• The destination:street ( for ways that lead towards streets, avenues, boulevard, rue) tags are not being used.

Our questions are:

• Is the usage of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name instead of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:destination on the exit nodes the usual protocol?
• Is it acceptable if we change the https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name tag to the appropriate destination tags and move the tags from the Exit nodes to the correspoding ways?

—> A full breakdown of the observations and here’s the OSMWiki for adding destination tags.

We would like to hear from the community about the agreed method of mapping exit numbers and destinations in Canada to take this further.

The turn restriction sprint in Canada was met with an immense support from the OpenStreetMap Community who guided us in all stages by improving our workflow, keeping an eye on the errors and contributing to adding turn restrictions and also Mapillary. It would be great to have you working with us in adding exit and destinations in all the five priority cities of Canada and making sure all the gaps are filled :)