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Comment by roeles | Hacker News Reader

I tried editing my area to reflect road closures due to construction. It was surprisingly difficult. Spent an hour searching online. My edit was denied by the reviewer (I used the wrong method) and the closure was not reflected in the map.

Google maps was a one minute process and it was reflected in the map after about an hour. OSM stayed outdated for weeks.

From this experience I am tempted to conclude that OSM needs to make mapping easier.

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I'm sorry that you had a bad experience adding data. Road closures are a somewhat advanced topic and differ in tagging depending on how long the road is expected to be closed. For short closures it's not recommended to actually mark the map as unpassable unconditionally because some offline routers may be stuck with months old data, depending on how often they update. So short closures would be tagged as

    motor_vehicle:conditional=no @ (date range)

while longer closures would use something like

    highway=construction
    construction=tertiary
    opening_date=2025-01

That being said, I'm surprised you ended up in the review process, as there isn't really one per se. Just a flag in the changeset that's typically not observed unless some people actively look for that (although new account + first changeset + review flag may have been picked up by someone). Some projects like HOTOSM (the Humanitarian OSM Project) do have a mandated review process and it seems to work fairly well most of the time.

So basically, your edit should have been visible on the map around a minute after making it, but was apparently reverted later. Unless you actually destroyed something I'd say that's not very typical. Reverts are somewhat rare and contributors are trusted to some degree.

As for specific tagging situations, there's probably always something to improve. StreetComplete works really well for keeping track of what's there, other apps have their own niche, and there may not be one that specifically targets road closures.

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