Heya all, thank you again for interest in OSM and all the great improvements.
I'll merge my responses in one post to hopefully make it easier to follow.
An interesting distinction is that your work was essentially a donation to Waze (Google), as the dataset is closed. With OSM, you and anybody else can benefit in mobile applications like maps.me and OsmAnd, various websites, or download it for professional/commercial use.
This distinction might not be crucial for everybody, but to many OSM community members it feels better to contribute to a shared good than donating to a single company
Side topic - if you have a Garmin GPS, did you know that you can get free maps for offline use, including routing? See Free worldwide Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap .
As you might have guessed, adding a street, forest path or track etc in OSM will make those appear on your Garmin devices a bit later
I'm not aware of a "perfectly mapped parking lot", partially because all contributors have different interests.
For example, I map parking areas, aisles and footways to ensure correct routing both for driving and walking modes. I sometimes also map grass areas (for prettier maps) and fire hydrants (because why not, and because there is a dedicated map for them).
When I was in Austin for the first time (and first time in the USA) years ago, I mapped a whole lot of parking lots with focus on those things. The ones around OpenStreetMap are not super-detailed, but at least the basics should be correct according to OSM.
As for fire hydrants, you might be able to figure out my main area of movement from Fire Hydrants
Now, other contributors would have different focus. People on this thread seem to care about kerbs (curbs), which is not high on my personal list. Yet other contributors would care even more about them, down to the height. Why?
Wheelchair routing.
See Key:kerb - OpenStreetMap Wiki and Wheelmap – Find wheelchair accessible places. which is dedicated to identifying wheelchair-friendly places.
If you are in a wheelchair or know somebody who is, this is a great opportunity to both raise awareness and benefit from the mapped data.
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Using OSM ways (lines) per lane - in most cases that should not be done. In OSM roads are represented with two ways (lines) if they are physically separated (some barrier, grass area etc).
But there's nothing preventing you from adding lane information, see Key:lanes - OpenStreetMap Wiki . Tesla routing might or might not use it, but it's still useful detail to add.
Please see above about tagging lanes. If a parking aisle has two lanes and is bi-directional, it should still be one OSM way (line), but you can add lanes=2. If it's oneway, you mark it as oneway=yes, and also lanes=2.
But please don't change them to residential roads, that would be wrong
Most imagery will be offset from somewhat to a lot. The best is to collect a lot of GPS traces of streets in that area, upload them to OSM and then use that data to align imagery. That's a huge, separate topic of its own, Using Imagery - OpenStreetMap Wiki might be a good starting point.
Indeed, please note that "oneway=yes" tag indicates that the way only allows travel in the direction the OSM way (line) is in. It will usually be indicated with arrow symbols on the way (line).
Really great tips, I encourage everybody to closely follow these. See kerb/curb difference above as an example of BE/AE.
Presumably they use Mapbox services which would mean most data sourced from OSM.
When you say "reverted", do you mean in OSM data or somewhere else?
I'll merge my responses in one post to hopefully make it easier to follow.
An interesting distinction is that your work was essentially a donation to Waze (Google), as the dataset is closed. With OSM, you and anybody else can benefit in mobile applications like maps.me and OsmAnd, various websites, or download it for professional/commercial use.
This distinction might not be crucial for everybody, but to many OSM community members it feels better to contribute to a shared good than donating to a single company
Side topic - if you have a Garmin GPS, did you know that you can get free maps for offline use, including routing? See Free worldwide Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap .
As you might have guessed, adding a street, forest path or track etc in OSM will make those appear on your Garmin devices a bit later
I'm not aware of a "perfectly mapped parking lot", partially because all contributors have different interests.
For example, I map parking areas, aisles and footways to ensure correct routing both for driving and walking modes. I sometimes also map grass areas (for prettier maps) and fire hydrants (because why not, and because there is a dedicated map for them).
When I was in Austin for the first time (and first time in the USA) years ago, I mapped a whole lot of parking lots with focus on those things. The ones around OpenStreetMap are not super-detailed, but at least the basics should be correct according to OSM.
As for fire hydrants, you might be able to figure out my main area of movement from Fire Hydrants
Now, other contributors would have different focus. People on this thread seem to care about kerbs (curbs), which is not high on my personal list. Yet other contributors would care even more about them, down to the height. Why?
Wheelchair routing.
See Key:kerb - OpenStreetMap Wiki and Wheelmap – Find wheelchair accessible places. which is dedicated to identifying wheelchair-friendly places.
If you are in a wheelchair or know somebody who is, this is a great opportunity to both raise awareness and benefit from the mapped data.
-----------------------------------
Using OSM ways (lines) per lane - in most cases that should not be done. In OSM roads are represented with two ways (lines) if they are physically separated (some barrier, grass area etc).
But there's nothing preventing you from adding lane information, see Key:lanes - OpenStreetMap Wiki . Tesla routing might or might not use it, but it's still useful detail to add.
Please see above about tagging lanes. If a parking aisle has two lanes and is bi-directional, it should still be one OSM way (line), but you can add lanes=2. If it's oneway, you mark it as oneway=yes, and also lanes=2.
But please don't change them to residential roads, that would be wrong
Most imagery will be offset from somewhat to a lot. The best is to collect a lot of GPS traces of streets in that area, upload them to OSM and then use that data to align imagery. That's a huge, separate topic of its own, Using Imagery - OpenStreetMap Wiki might be a good starting point.
Indeed, please note that "oneway=yes" tag indicates that the way only allows travel in the direction the OSM way (line) is in. It will usually be indicated with arrow symbols on the way (line).
Really great tips, I encourage everybody to closely follow these. See kerb/curb difference above as an example of BE/AE.
Presumably they use Mapbox services which would mean most data sourced from OSM.
When you say "reverted", do you mean in OSM data or somewhere else?
