OpenStreetMap maintenance: the potential problem, and the forgotten Strava tools
Ramojus Lapinskas · October 25, 2025
The potential problem
OpenStreetMap (OSM) paths might not be receiving enough maintenance to be trustworthy.
While there had been numerous studies on OSM quality, none that I could find had investigated the quality of OSM paths on a global or even national scale, with most studies focusing on urban areas.
Path quality might be a problem, as OSM contributors are volunteers, and they have no obligations to provide accurate paths in certain area, especially if they don’t have local knowledge of that area.
OSM has 10 million registered potential contributors of whom, at the time of writing, only about 50,000 are active monthly. That’s roughly one active contributor per 165,000 people in the world. It is quite likely that an average contributor will not have enough involvement and knowledge of local area to maintain paths made by this many people. The good news is that the amount of work could be reduced by some automated tools, with a good source of data.
To automatize path maintenance in an area, one needs to know how people move in that area, and for that, Strava, which is a popular platform for sharing activities among sports enthusiasts, is a very good source. Strava has accumulated more than 12 billion activities – much more movement data than what has been added to OSM by volunteers, which only holds about 30 billion coordinates in total. For reference, one activity of median duration on Strava (53 minutes) might contain anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand coordinates. Here is a visual comparison – a popular running spot in Vilnius, overlaid with both, OSM movement data (gps traces), and Strava movement data (heatmap):
Strava recognized the potential of their dataset, and lets their heatmap be used for OSM contributions – but they didn’t stop there.
At the 2014 State of the Map conference, they introduced a new tool called Slide. It automatically shifts segments of a selected path to match the Strava heatmap, making the path more accurate.
Later, at the 2024 State of the Map conference, Strava showed another new tool called Patchwork. This tool helps to find new paths in a selected area, by checking where Strava heatmap does not match the marked paths.
Both tools have a lot of potential, but sadly, neither is functional at the moment.
The unnoticed subproblem
With the hope that the Strava tools may yet be revived, I turn to another aspect of OSM maintenance – abandoned paths.
Due to the nature of volunteer-based system, most of the data in OSM is provided by people with no obligations towards maintaining the data in the future. From this comes a concern that many abandoned paths might still be marked in OSM, leading people astray. Personally, I have experienced this many times, but I could find no studies investigating the global reality of this.
Strava heatmap would be a very good source to discover abandoned paths.
The heatmap alone is not enough, of course – the fact that a path is not used by any athletes does not necessarily mean it is no longer visible. A local knowledge or local confirmation would be needed.
Verification of abandoned paths could prove as an interesting exercise variation for bored athletes. Additionally, if one already knows an area well, the suggested abandoned paths could simply be approved or rejected with a single click.
There is a potential here for a new tool that would help with both problems: the non-functional Strava tools, and the potential problem of abandoned paths.
I plan to develop such a tool in two parts:
- The first part will serve as a basis for similar tools – tools that in some way update OSM based on the Strava heatmap data. Such a basis could prove useful if the mentioned Strava tools do not get revived. As it will be open source, anyone will be able to extend it to their needs.
- The second part will utilize the first part by implementing the abandoned path search and removal.
The tool will:
- Help to show how much of a problem the abandoned paths are in OSM.
- Help mitigate this potential problem.
- Help the OSM community be a little less dependant on tools provided by Strava.