Today's fun with OpenStreetMap and route planners: A route planner for Denmark that refuses to drive on roads named after men.
About 40,000 Danish roads (= 35 % af all Danish roads) have been tagged with name:etymology:wikidata to tag into Wikidata's structured content.
Other ideas for funny restrictions? Roads named after politicians of specific political parties? Roads named after royals? (¡Viva la revolución!) Roads named after Swedes?
I'm still testing out stuff, but the service will probably be available online for public use one of these days.
It is simply based on OSRM, an OSM dump of Denmark from Geofabrik, a local script to update the OSM file with extra tags for matched roads based on a database lookup with the Wikidata content as well, and a custom .lua file for OSRM to prevent using roads with the extra tags.
@brodersen #alt4you (feel free to edit the post and add the (alt) text to the image itself):
This screen recording displays the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) demo interface. On a map of a Danish city, a route has been calculated between two relatively close points, marked with a green start pin and a red end pin. However, the generated blue route line is a bit convoluted, taking a long and circuitous path that detours significantly away from a direct course.
@MapComplete Yeah, I have been using MapComplete excessively for the last 1½ year for that exact purpose, creating thousands of entries in Wikidata as well and updating most of the ways that now have this tag 🙂 Thank you for an excellent service!
https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/europe:denmark/keys/name%3Aetymology%3Awikidata#chronology
@brodersen Yeah, I know. You are (together with some others) one of the big drivers for 'number of changes' in the statistics.
Btw, the etymology theme was a bit of an afterthought itself. I (@pietervdvn) created the Wikidata-link item for a different theme. A bit later, I realized it wouldn't be much hassle the setup an etymology thing to help equalstreetnames.
@pietervdvn Yes, 40.000 individual streets when aggregated locally and grouped by municipalities. In OSM terms it's about 160.000 ways, but MapComplete helps group local ways together.
I have been to the library a lot for the last two years.
@jachym I use the OSRM routing engine based on OpenStreetMap data.
I have downloaded every wikidata entry that is referred for the origin of the name of the way (name:etymology:wikidata key in OpenStreetMap) and created a list of ways named after men. I then downloaded an extract of OpenStreetMap for Denmark, ran a script to update every way with a custom tag (etymology_has_male=yes) and updated the lua file for OSRM to avoid every way and node with that tag.
@brodersen Awesome!
Here's how you can improve this data:
https://en.osm.town/@amapanda/114562398764953834
Want to improve coverage of road name etymology in #OpenStreetMap? This command gives you the longest roads with missing data, so you can make progress faster! `osm-lump-ways -f name -f highway -f "∄name:etymology:wikidata" -g name -i INPUT_FILE.osm.pbf -o MISSING.geojson` Optionally use `--only-longest-n-per-file N` for the longest N roads. Or `--min-length-m X` for only roads longer then N metres.
@amapanda That is so cool! I definitely need to try that one out.
In the opposite direction I created a graph with the largest tree, only with streets named after men. This is also extremely fast in Postgres/PostGIS.
(this is based on some early code I did; newer code is also aware of the transgender wikidata entries, even though we don't have any roads in Denmark named after transgender persons yet)
@brodersen
Hallo Peter, in 2020 Mark Padgham and me worked at a meeting in the Linux-Hotel in Essen on a project called Gender-Concious Routing. It was late at night and we ha a lot of red wine🍷 before.🙂
Our "rules" were not as strict as yours, male rules were not blocked but only valued equaly as female roads.
@brodersen
What is your source for the links to wikidata? First guess is not always right.
I have a long row of books related to the theme streetname etymology.
For example in Düsseldorf (my OSM Base) Lessingstraße and Lessingplatz are not named after Gottfried Ephraim Lessing the writer like 95% of streets with this name, but after Carl Friedrich Lessing a painter of the local Düsseldorfer Schule (art academy).
@black_bike Lots and lots of visits to my local library:
https://mastodon.cloud/@brodersen/114564285004290813
I have tried to document every resource I have used. Besides books I have sent a bunch of emails as well as searched lots of Wiki-sites for local historical organizations:
https://github.com/PeterBrodersen/osmetymology/blob/main/Resources.md
And yes, there are several issues. I have listed a bunch of "first guess" caveats here:
https://github.com/PeterBrodersen/osmetymology?tab=readme-ov-file#caveats
Attached: 1 image I have been visiting my local library (as well as random online resources) a lot for the past 18 months for information about local toponyms. Fortunately we have a great library system in Denmark, making it easy to search for books online, put up reservations and having them delivered to your local library in a couple of days (!). My non-exhaustive list of sources I have been using so far: https://github.com/PeterBrodersen/osmetymology/blob/main/Resources.md
@black_bike I do love when the books mention the exact birth and death year for a person. Recently I should add a link for "Bredo Henrik von Munthe af Morgenstierne", but to my surprise several people were named that several people were named that!
https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredo_Henrik_von_Munthe_af_Morgenstierne
Fortunately the relevant years could help me pinpoint the correct one.
Oh, and the most common street name in Denmark is "Lærkevej", which could both be named for the lark tree and for the larch bird ...
@brodersen
"Lærkevej" is easy in German because the tree is written Lärche🌲 (not evergreen!) and the bird is written Lerche.🐦
Our problem is "Bachstraße". Is it named after a nearby little river or by a person from the famous musical🎶 syndicate?
@brodersen
You mentioned that you didn't visit equalstrreetnames.org.
But I hope you know the OpenEtymologyMap: https://etymology.dsantini.it/#12.58480,55.67096,14.1,feature_source,pmtiles_all,stamen_toner_lite,etymology,2025
Nice article about it (german): https://geoobserver.de/2021/10/21/die-wortherkunftskarte-open-etymology-map-2/
The documentation (in german) for my project to map the etymology of streetnames in Düsseldorf (where this stuff started) can be found on OSM-Wiki-pages: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/D%C3%BCsseldorf/Projekte/Stra%C3%9Fennamen
Did this for several other cities.
@black_bike Yes, I used it a lot before I created my own frontend! It is a great resource. I do however love to have stuff locally to be able to make weird and crazy queries :-)
Attached: 1 image There are other great sites out there such as https://etymology.dsantini.it/ that provides more options for visualization (based on gender, country, century, profession, and so on). It works best for me with a complete local database import to be able to perform more advanced queries, such as fetching the largest tree of roads named after men, as shown in this picture. This is extremely fast in Postgres/PostGIS and only takes a couple of seconds (ST_ClusterWithin() is my friend!).
@amapanda For my current process I load a .pbf, retrieve a list from my database of all ids of ways named after men (or at least have one of the topic if several named after men) and add a custom tag (etymology_has_male=yes) to those ways and resave to a new .pbf.
I have fetched a local copy of every wikidata item that is referred to, making these database lookups extremely fast with the proper GIN index for my postgres json table.
Peter Brodersen
Thibaultmol 🌈
MapComplete
Emily_S
Leeloo
DoudouOSM
b-unicyling
Joost Schouppe
Pietervdvn 
Jachym Cepicky
Amᵃᵖanda | map data witch
black_bike (Harald Schwarz)
Crovanian
Klaus Vink Slott