Mapping roads & transport

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Outside the big towns, the Amazon's transport network is a patchwork of paved highways, dirt roads, logging tracks, footpaths and river crossings — many of which appear, wash out, or change with the season. Capturing this network accurately is one of the most practical things a mapper can do.

Classifying roads

OpenStreetMap sorts roads into a hierarchy by importance, from major through-routes down to minor tracks and paths. Getting the class right matters because navigation tools rely on it. As a rough guide:

• Through-roads link towns and carry most traffic. Map these first; they form the skeleton of the network.
• Local and residential roads serve a settlement's own streets.
• Tracks are unpaved routes used for forestry, farming or access — extremely common in the basin.
• Paths and footways are for people on foot, often the only link to small or riverside communities.

If you can't tell a road's exact class from imagery alone, choose the most cautious reasonable tag and let a local mapper refine it later.

Seasonal and unreliable connections

A recurring lesson from mapping the basin is that many overland links are not dependable. A track that's perfectly passable in the dry season may be impassable mud — or underwater — when the rivers rise. Some “roads” on old data turn out to be broken or wildly indirect when checked against imagery. Where a route is rough, unpaved or seasonal, tag it honestly: surface and condition tags tell routing software (and the people relying on it) what to expect. A map that promises a road which doesn't really work is worse than one that's blank.

Don't forget water transport

Because rivers do so much of the carrying here, the transport map isn't complete without them. Map the ferry routes and river crossings that link one bank to another, and the docks, landings and ports where boats tie up. For a riverside village, the dock is often the single most important point on the whole map.

Practical tips

1. Connect everything. Roads that meet must share a node, or routing breaks at the junction.
2. Bridge over water, don't cross it flat. Where a road crosses a river, tag the bridge so it isn't read as a ford or an error.
3. Name what you can verify. Add road names only when you genuinely know them; a wrong name is hard for others to catch.
4. Trace gently curving roads with enough nodes so vehicles can be routed smoothly, but keep straight sections simple.

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