Hey guys.
There’s a highway that connect the coast to inland, and without it drivers have a 4-hour detour. It has been closed for the past month while a forest fire has been fought by lots of fire crews. It’s been burning since August 15th, so over a month now actually.
They’ve finally mitigated the fire enough that they are temporarily re-opening the highway, however it’s remaining closed 8am - 4pm Mon-Fri so that the firemen are not blocked by congestion. When it’s not closed between those hours, only 1 lane is open and traffic is led by patrol cars. There is no ETA for a full re-opening.
I went to go apply a condition, when I realized that no one had actually closed the road in the first place. So I added something like “conditional=no @ (Mon-Fri 8:00-16:00)” (I forget the exact syntax).
A day later, someone came in and reverted the change saying “the consensus is that only changes lasting 3 or more months should be made. There are people who download these maps for offline use. So no temporary closures.”
But, the DOT of both states this fire is affecting are begging drivers to stop using GPS to the coast on this route - people are driving into active fire zones.
Does concession for offline users actually supersede safety?
You think about present users, but you should also think about the future. I found “temporarily” closed roads on osm which were forgotten. The road block lasted for a month irl, the editor forgot it and it remained closed for 6 years on the map. I found while debugging why a router was sending me a longer route.
Map software can add additional data, e.g. I know Magic Earth knows current road closures and traffic situations from different sources, it display them alongside the osm map, and considers them for routing.
It’s also documented as a best practice: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don’t_map_temporary_events_and_temporary_features
It would be nice if we could map these temporary closures with an expiration date so that it goes away by itself.
Even then, it should be resurveyed as the road closure might have ended sooner or might be delayed. It’s the resurveying that is the tricky part.