So, how to map race tracks? Well, use highway=raceway but there’s a little more to it than that. not complicated, but the details can matter. This diary entry covers my own approach, which I think is a good one, but there’s always a chance of disagreement.

highway=raceway itself

Like any highway= tag, raceway is for a linear, possibly closed way. A closed raceway is not a polygon, as such usage would be difficult for data consumers to distinguish from an actual closed way such as an oval track. If you want to specify the width of a racetrack, there is a width tag. It does not seem widely used, but it is documented in the OSM wiki. It’s in meters, by the way. Specifying lanes=2 can be a reasonable thing for a Drag Strip as an alternative.

I only use highway=raceway for hot areas. Hot areas are the parts of the race track which are restricted to folks with special credentials - race and track officials, drivers, and designated crew. Regular ticker buyers are not permitted into these areas and most of them involve cars traveling at speed.

access roads and parking

For generalized access roads, highway=service is appropriate. For obvious reasons, use amenity=parking for the race paddock and any spectator parking. Use name to specify what type of parking and possibly designate specific purposes; Lime Rock Park and Thompson Speedway both have similar names for their two paddock spaces, the blindingly obvious “A Paddock” and “B Paddock”. The road from the end of a Drag Strip shutdown area back to the paddock is often referred to as a “return road” and that’s how I name them.

access

For operating race tracks access should probably be private, as a purchased or comped ticket, or official credentials are required for access.

oneway?

Most race tracks are oneway. Drag strips and ovals, always. You can tell which is the start end of the drag strip by the black burnout marks. US ovals are always run counter-clockwise, that is, you are always turning left.

Road courses are mostly one way, which has to do with barrier type and configuration. Road courses that can be legitimately run in either direction are very rare. In the North East US, Palmer Motorsports Park is the only one I am aware of which can use either direction. oneway=reversible is the correct tag to use in such cases. But if you see guardrail barriers it cannot be run in either direction.

variants and names

If the race track only has one variation (common for Ovals and Drag Strips), then I set name to the current name of the track in OSM. in OHM I use the best known or last used name. Since OHM records history (which OSM mostly does not), I may list other known names in the OHM wiki entry on the race track.

Some courses have a lot of variation. The history of tracks such as Riverside (in California) and Thompson (in Connecticut) is particularly complex. The natural way to resolve this is with relations. I currently use the type=circuit relation, but it’s only a proposal that has some age on it.

A case can be made for making race circuits a subtype of the route relation. I think I like the route relation subtype better, quite frankly, but I haven’t made time for a proposal. Here is a link to my leaflet widget based map of Thompson so you can play with the layers control in the upper right and see what I get from using relations: Thompson Speedway

start_date and end_date

I add start_date in OSM, and start_date and end_date in OHM whenever possible. I have a reference libarary available to me that lets me figure out (at least to the year) for nearly all of the tracks in the US and Canada, and am happy to respond to research requests for this sort of thing. In OHM, license= and source= tags are strongly recommend, with the OHM preference for license being CC0. This is one difference between OSM and OHM, and is also a reason why copying geometry from OSM to OHM for defunct tracks can be problematic. Think before you copy and consider alternative approaches (but that’s another diary entry.)

specifying sources for data in OHM

For OHM sources, I maintain a directory in the OHM section of the OSM wiki of “Ghost Tracks” I have entered into OHM, and i set the source tag to the URL of the appropriate entry in that directory.

a style problem

Now for the joker in the deck - this tagging scheme works well with the older OSM style, but has issues with the newer version carto. The short version is that the rendering of raceway right now is almost invisible so the track can’t be seen well but the service roads can be. I have not altered my tagging (yet) but instead am going to be bringing my concerns to the talk list in a few days, to see what the authors of the stylesheet are thinking and whether they have considered this. Because nobody should be tagging just for the renderer.

i’ve started working on adding Auto Racing venues in the US & Canada to the map, and improving those that are already in the map.

this exercise is in two parts; for those tracks that are still clearly visible (active or inactive) i will add the tracks to OSM. For those which are more doubtful, or which will never return to service, i am adding them to OHM. Examples of the latter include tracks like the first and second circuits at Watkins Glen. hopefully, when the site of an inactive track is redeveloped, we’ll reach a state where instead of deleting tracks, they get moved to OHM.

for tagging, i am mostly using ways with highway=raceway. if a direction is discernible (ovals are usually counter clockwise), i set oneway as well. I try to identify the bounding area for the facility and create a landuse=recreation_ground poly with the name and address of the site.

I have largely completed Alaska, am currently nearly done with Arizona, and have also done several examples of historic tracks in upstate New York. i will be working on the south and southwest for the time being, as that is where people are racing at this time of year.

in Arizona i have seen a couple of examples where the race track was done as a multi polygon relation tagged as leisure=track. this tag is for non-motorized racing, not for auto racing. although in the 20s and 30s there were some dual purpose tracks (horses and cars), this practice was abandoned before WWII. i am changing the tags to highway=raceway, but the current mapnik style sheet doesn’t render highway=raceway on relations, so as a temporary expedient i am adding ways in the center, which i will go back and remove when the style sheet is updates (and yes, there is a tracker on this in the mapnik queue).

i have a leaflet example of an OHM/OSM mashup here showing the modern Watkins Glen circuit (the 4th circuit) overlaid with the OHM representation of the 2nd Watkins Glen circuit (the first Glen circuit is up and to the right): http://www.na-motorsports.com/test/test.html

… this coming weekend, and now i’m hearing that there may actually be 2 or 3 people in the room for my presentation. i guess i better put a few more minutes into it so it doesn’t suck so much.

over on my regular blog: http://www.averillpark.net/thisendup/index.php?/archives/127-The-current-mapping-rig.html

New blog posting - in which I am disappointed in a long standing, well regarded local map provider in the Capital District of New York: Disappointment with Jimapco

Delaware County routes and town borders done. It was surprisingly easy, and a number of sins along the NY/PA border were dealt with. I see more issues with the NY/PA border going west, and will look at that after i take care of Westchester County. Westchester will be interesting. the density of places with borders in Rockland County made adding the town borders more complex, and on the south end i need to make sure what i do is compatible with any border work done for NYC by Serge (User:emacsen). addtionally Westchester County routes are unsigned, so i’ll be putting in route relations but will be using unsigned_ref instead of ref.

The county routes now look good, except for one or two notes that need to be resolved. On to Delaware County Town borders! Here is a sample of Rockland County Routes with shields

Boy, that was a pain in the butt. Virtually every place (village, cdp, etc) had noticable variance between 2008 and 2013 TIGER border data. I had to update all of them before i could even consider adding town lines. Rockland County isn’t that large, but it is dense, this was a pretty tedious process. Additionally, the consolidation of the NY/PA state boundary with the place boundaries was only partially done, so i tried to clean that up. Finally, the old USGS county border between Westchester and Rockland is gone, replaced by TIGER 2013 data that matches the place and town boundaries. the Hudson River looks much cleaner now. On to Rockland County Route Relations!

Sullivan County routes are done, but with a lot of notes in OSM about things that need ground survey. I’m now looking at Rockland County, and have discovered that there is considerable variance between 2008 TIGER place boundaries and 2013 TIGER. i’ll have to update a lot of the place (village, city, CDP) boundaries and generally improve relations and border sharing before i can consider bringing in 2013 TIGER town boundaries. i figured this out when i first looked at the border for the Town of Ramapo, which i thought was going to quick and easy. nope, in areas that are this built up, there are a lot of place boundaries and when they’re not quite right, well, nothing is easy.

the town borders for Sullivan County are done. updated at the same time (because they’re shared), the border between Sullivan and Delaware Counties, and the Sullivan County section of the border between NY & PA. On to Sullivan County Routes!

work is continuing on getting route relations in upstate New York up to snuff for the highway shields project. Chris Curtis continues to work along the Mohawk Valley, and I just (mostly) finished the County Route Relations for Orange County. Next up is Sullivan County, but as always i do the administrative border improvements first, then the CR relations. After Sullivan come Rockland, Delaware, and Westchester counties in that order. A sample of what the map looks like with shields can be seen here. Thanks to Phil Gold, Toby Murray, and Ian Dees for the work they’ve put into making shields possible.

US borders (state, county, etc.) are kind of a mess. some areas have been cleaned up, but most of them are pretty bad, the result of imports from different sources of varying quality. The USGS county borders from a few years back are quite bad, for example. Most cities, villages and CDPs have borders from 2008 TIGER, which is better but doesn’t match well; the result is that where locality borders “match” county and state boundaries is usually pretty messy. For the the past couple of months, another NYS mapper (Chris Curtis) and I have been working to improve the border situation. Things are looking very good from Lake Champlain south along the Hudson River to Putnam and Orange Counties, and pushing west along the Mohawk. What we’re doing is using the current TIGER county subdivisions borders and gradually replacing bad county and state borders from the USGS import with generally more accurate TIGER boundaries. As we do this, an added bonus is that we can share borders with localities as they usually match up well; when they don’t match up, we can grab 2013 TIGER borders from the places shape file and frequently, the mismatch is because of something that improved in TIGER in the past 5 years. But the border between NY & NJ, and NY & PA is proving to be a bit nasty. there have been a bunch of uncoordinated imports with little to no QC over the years, and it’s going to take a while to disentangle all of it. but the area around Port Jervis is now a bit better, and things will continue to improve (i hope).

so i see i wrote one diary entry right after i joined, then never bothered again. in the meantime i’ve served on the board (and as president of) the OSM US Chapter and edited the map a lot. Current Projects: 1) updating/improving borders along the lower Hudson Valley. Just finished Ulster County, about to start Dutchess County. 2) adding County Route relations in the same counties, in anticipation of the US shields stuff going online. 3) going through old GPX tracks from this past winter/spring/summer looking for data that i collected and didn’t enter. at this moment, i’m looking at data i collected in late February when i went on vacation in northern virginia.

Just starting to learn how this works. Added some detail for local roads I drive on daily. The old Burden Lake Speedway (1948-195?) was marked as a private service road, it's not really driveable anymore so I labeled it a track and added a historic- tag. I'll have to go look and see what is there for the Route 66 Speedway and Pine Bowl Speedway (both defunct, still traces of their existence).