About "Where Are My Ways?"

Purpose

OpenStreetMap data has become the source for map data for outdoor activities. Hikers and cyclists sometimes use private tracks and paths or ways where they are not welcome. Some land owners or authorities delete those tracks and paths. Many deletions are reverted but some are overseen.

Where Are My Ways aims to provide a visualisation of the geometry of ways which were deleted from OpenStreetMap.

What is shown on the map?

The map shows all ways which have been deleted after 12 Septembe 2012 when OpenStreetMap changed its license to Open Database License. Deletions prior to this data are not taken into account for the following reasons

• Prior to the license change, some data had to be removed from OpenStreetMap because those users did not agree to the new Contributor Terms. With a current ODbL licensed data dump one cannot reconstruct their geometries because the non-ODbL versions have been purged from the database.
• Even in countries which have been mapped with lots of details around 2012, many deletions by landowners, hunters and rangers started after the license change. The popularity and wide adoption of apps for outdoor recreation using OpenStreetMap made landowners, hunters and rangers aware of the OpenStreetMap project.
• In the early days of OpenStreetMap, many ways were deleted and recreated immediately afterwards. This causes noise on the map.

Map Key

Grey lines are the restored geometries of ways which have been deleted. If you click on any of those lines, you can get the OSM way ID and the tags the way had in its last visible version.

Black lines are the restored geometries of ways which have been deleted and had any of the following keys in their last visible version: highway, disused:highway, abandoned:highway. Ways which are in close proximity of existing ways are not shown in black colour. You can use the black lines to find ways which were deleted in order to be forgotten. Many of them might be vandalism, mapping accidents or complete junk.

Which area is covered?

The prototype covers Germany, Austria and Switzerland only. This map does not receive automatic data updates. It has OpenStreetMap data until 2026-03-16 00:58:54 UTC.

How is data processed?

All source code is public. You can find it on Codeberg. Documentation of processing is published there, too.

Limitations

This map shows the shape of an OpenStreetMap way one moment prior to its deletion. Versioning of nodes and ways are independent in OpenStreetMap. Moving a node updates its version but it leaves the ways using the node unchanged. The ways are update if the node is added to/removed from them.

OpenStreetMap's data model does not have merge or split operation for ways. If a way is split, the old way is shortened and a new way. If two ways are merged, one way will be deleted and the merged list of node IDs is copied to the other way. Detecting splits and mergers of ways is guessing.