We have added over 95,000 turn lanes in 10 U.S. cities to improve navigation data in OpenStreetMap. If you’ve mapped turn lanes before, you know how cumbersome it can be to accurately tag turn lanes. To address this head on, our team has developed the TurnLanes-tagging plugin for the Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM).
With this plugin, you can add complex tag combinations for turn lanes at road junctions with ease, and minimize errors. If you’re new to turn lane mapping, read our first post on how to get started.
Using the TurnLanes-tagging plugin
The TurnLanes-tagging plugin works on both uni-directional and bi-directional roads. You can add lane counts as well as individual turn lanes in each direction. The plugin intuitively provides presets for the most common, and recently used, turn lane combinations, and also automatically updates lane count based on the number of turn lanes for the road.
To get started, activate the plugin from JOSM Preferences > Plugins > turnlanes-tagging and restart JOSM (if needed).
To use the plugin, select a road and open the turnlanes-tagging plugin in the edit menu. Choose the type of way (uni- or bi-directional), then set the number of lane. Click the icons to specify the allowed direction of movement per each lane.
Read more here about using TurnLanes-tagging plugin! Let me or Andrey know, or share on GitHub if you have questions or ideas for improvements.