Something that I find tedious is naming residential streets. When I look at what others have mapped, and see a city with everything nicely named, I am impressed by how complete things look. But I still lack the time and/or motivation to add thousands of street names one by one. It is overwhelming.
So I came up with a work-around, which was to write an algorithm that reads through an .OSM file, searching for ways tagged to indicate that a name is needed, and then add a name from a preprepared list.
I ran it for the first time yesterday afternoon, and 7600 streets were named after about 16 hours. I suspect it would have been much faster if I had not gone through the entire 1.3 million line OSM file for my territory. Calculating the length of every way, in order to name different types of streets based on length, also slowed things down.
Here is a before and after:
There are some issues:
My bridges are tagged as separate ways, so streets that have bridges are seen as multiple ways, each one getting its own name. Some manual work was needed to fix those.
Sloppy mapping (non-connected ways that make up the same street), resulted in the same problem. More manual fixing.
Same issue with boulevards made of two one-way ways.
Name selection ends up being random, so important streets that need specific names need to be tagged manually.
Sequential naming in grid layouts is not possible.
I need to clean up the Java code a little bit, but would be happy to provide it, and some general instructions, to anyone who is interested in trying to use it. (At your own risk!) JOSM is needed, and results should be checked carefully before uploading.
Or I'd be happy to run the process for anyone who has 1000s of unnamed highways. With your own list of names, of course.