Correct turn restriction information is essential for the vehicle routing quality of any street network dataset – open or commercial. One of the challenges of this kind of information is that these restrictions are typically not directly visible on each map.
This post is inspired by a share on G+ which resurfaced in my notifications. In a post on the Mapbox blog, John Firebaugh presents the OSM iD editor which should make editing turn restrictions straight-forward: clicking on the source link turns the associated turn information visible. By clicking on the turn arrows, the user can easily toggle between allowed and forbidden.
editing turn restrictions in iD, the web editor for OpenStreetMap. source: “Simple Editing for Turn Restrictions in OpenStreetMap” by John Firebaugh on June 06 2014
But the issue of identifying wrong turn restrictions remains. One approach to solving this issue is to compare restriction information in OSM with the information in a reference data set.
This is possible by comparing routes computed on OSM and the reference data using a method I presented at FOSS4G (video): a turn restriction basically is a forbidden combination of links. If we compute the route from the start link of the forbidden combination to the end link, we can check if the resulting route geometry violates the restriction or uses an appropriate detour:
illustrative slide from my LBS2014 presentation on OSM vehicle routing quality – read more about this method and results for Vienna in our TGIS paper or the open pre-print version
It would be great to have an automated system comparing OSM and open government street network data to detect these differences. The quality of both data sets could benefit enormously by bundling their QA efforts. Unfortunately, the open government street network data sets I’m aware of don’t contain turn information.
