OSM roads polygonized in PostGIS = nonsense

Question

I have a dump of OSM data in my city and wrote a query to polygonize it. In the first attempt, the result looked like this:

The problem was that OSM lines were not split and I guessed that the polygonizer only made polygons of entire linestrings:

^^ here, the green nodes are used for polygons, the blue ones are ignored, together with line 3.

Since st_split supports slice by multiple points only in PostGIS 2.2, I decided to write a Python script to do this. Together with some SQL code, it splits lines into segments that respect intersections. Every road joining an intersection is unique.

The way I understand it now:

The SQL code:

CREATE VIEW nodes AS
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER () id, st_node(way) nd
FROM rd_sliced_roads;


DROP VIEW IF EXISTS pg;
CREATE VIEW pg AS
WITH   
    polygroup AS (SELECT ST_Polygonize(way) initial FROM nodes),
    dumped AS (SELECT (st_dump(initial)).geom result FROM polygroup)
SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER () id, result
FROM dumped;

The result is still quite similar: polygons are ignored, even though lines join each other. Red lines are both source and st_nodified lines. Why does st_polygonize ignore these small quarters?

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

Turned out, doing st_union instead of st_node did the trick. I still wonder what st_polygonize is so sensitive to?

So, the algorythm to make polygons is very simple:

with united as (select st_union(way) w from planet_osm_lines /* filter highways here */),
     polied as (select st_polygonize(w) w from united)
select (st_dump(w)).geom poly from polied;