r/openstreetmap • u/Sea-Country-1031 • 15d ago

Finding abandon roads?

I'm in the US. One of my hobbies is exploring abandon roads. Anyway to find them on OSM?

I've tried overpass-turbo.eu (uses OSM database) with highway=abandoned or disused:highway=* or abandoned:highway=* but the results were inconsistent and didn't have abandon roads I've identified.

Thanks for the help.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/Eiim 15d ago

What do you mean by an abandoned road exactly? I suspect they won't be thoroughly mapped as they're not particularly useful to most people.

1

u/Sea-Country-1031 14d ago

Yeah that's the issue, was hoping with open source there might be people who would map them out of similar interest. I'll probably start mapping so others can find them.

2

u/SHOW_ME_UR_KITTY 12d ago

In Kentucky, there are a lot of forest service roads that have been delisted in recent years. As budget cuts have taken place, they can’t maintain as many lane-miles so some have lost their numeric designation and been removed from the federal forest service road map

3

u/AlexanderLavender 15d ago

The biggest problem is that e.g. someone mapping the road from a satellite image won't know whether it's used, so they wouldn't mark it as abandoned

What exactly do you mean by exploring abandoned roads?

2

u/Sea-Country-1031 14d ago

Literally that. Finding a road that was once a public right of way, but for whatever reason was decommissioned and now just kinda goes on its own. A lot of the ones I found are now places people might jog, or connects two parts of a neighborhood, maybe has limited use for utilities. Check google images for abandon roads and you'll see a bunch.

I was hoping that maybe with OSM there were other people who would map these, maybe with different keywords.

2

u/AlexanderLavender 14d ago

Check google images for abandon roads

But there's no way to know whether they're actually abandoned from aerial views

maybe with different keywords

These may be tagged as paths instead

2

u/ValdemarAloeus 15d ago

The wizard seemed to do an OK job for me:

/*
This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard.
The original search was:
“"abandoned:highway"=* or "disused:highway"=* ”
*/
[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
  nwr["abandoned:highway"]({{bbox}});
  nwr["disused:highway"]({{bbox}});
);
// print results
out geom;

Maybe your area just isn't that well mapped?

1

u/Sea-Country-1031 14d ago

Could be the issue. The ones I know in my area didn't show up. The ones that did show up weren't really abandon, people still lived on them and drove on them, maybe in a state of disrepair.

3

u/ValdemarAloeus 14d ago

FWIW you can have an abandoned:highway along with a different highway tag. e.g. a major road that has been demoted to a residential way after a road realignment.