Tag: OpenStreetMap

Mapping a campground that doesn’t exist: a before and after view of OpenStreetMap

December 27, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Pretty soon there will be a campground shown in OpenStreetMap, and added to its geocoding database, when I’m done adding it.

I temporarily become addicted to mapping places on OpenStreetMap. In my quest to find and map all campgrounds in Chicagoland – in order to publish them in the Chicago Bike Guide – I came across a campground that was constructed this year and opened in August 2013. This is the story of figuring out how to map the Big Rock Forest Preserve campground in Big Rock, Illinois.

I found on the Kane County Forest Preserve District website that the organization operated a campground at Big Rock Forest Preserve. I couldn’t locate the campground in Google Maps by the address the website gave. I couldn’t find it in OpenStreetMap, either, because no one had mapped it, but it’s there now.

When I searched for the park by name, Google Maps zoomed me to the main entrance of the park, but I still couldn’t see a campground. I downloaded the forest preserve district’s park map (always as a PDF) and followed the roads in Google Maps until I came across the campgrounds approximate position. There was a new road here so I followed that to find a campground under construction.

Google Maps shows the campground and artificial lake under construction.

Google’s imagery of the under-construction campground was taken on May 23, 2013 (get the date from Google Earth). This was great because now I could open JOSM, a powerful desktop OpenStreetMap editor, and locate the site, load Bing’s imagery and start tracing the campground to upload to OSM.

Bing’s imagery in JOSM, the OpenStreetMap-editing app, doesn’t show the campground.

The problem was that Bing’s imagery – and this is typical – was outdated. I could easily compare the imagery side-by-side and based on other landscape features (like the forest edge) guess where to trace the campground, but OSM needs better quality data. Enter MapWarper.

Read the rest of this post on Web Map Academy.

Compiling and mapping Chicago-area campgrounds

December 26, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’m adding Chicago-area campgrounds to the Chicago Bike Guide to entice new users and to espouse the enjoyment of medium-distance bike camping (which I’ve now done officially once, earlier this year).

<The Chicago Bike Guide is available for Android and iOS.>

I’m taking a systematic approach to finding all the publicly-owned campgrounds in the area by looking at primary sources.

First, though, I’ve used Overpass Turbo to create a list of all existing campgrounds in OpenStreetMap. You can see a gist of these places.

Camp sites at Greene Valley forest preserve I mapped.

Camp sites at Greene Valley forest preserve I mapped.

The next method is to find out which campgrounds are operated by the county forest preserves, which are usually well-documented on their respective websites. Then I will look at state parks in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, operated by states’ respective Departments of Natural Resources (DNR). Next I will look at national parks and finally commercial campgrounds.

The app will display campground information such as alcohol rules, if cabins or lodging is available, and how you can get there (which trails or train lines).

I’ve so far mapped the campgrounds in two ways, as nodes and as areas. At the Greene Valley forest preserve in DuPage County, for example, I’ve mapped the 11 individual camp sites (see map), but at Blackwell forest preserve in the same county, I’ve mapped the area as the camp site (see map).

Blackwell has over 50 sites in a discrete area and it’s more efficient to map them as a single node, while Greene Valley had far fewer sites but scattered over a couple areas.

Cross-posted to Web Map Academy.

Google Maps’s lies are why I made my own bike map

October 22, 2013 / / 28 Comments
http://goo.gl/maps/BlIZF

Bright green lines indicate trails while darker green lines indicate bike lanes.

Because Google Maps lies about where bike facilities are. Check out the bicycling layer at 16th Street and Wood Street in Pilsen, Chicago, Illinois.

Google Maps bicycling layer legend

Google Maps bicycling layer legend

The bright green lines represent trails, but the ones in this part of Pilsen are not trails. All of the north-south “trails” you see are actually sidewalks underneath railroad viaducts. The east-west trails…well, I’m not sure what they are but they are on elevated railroad property. Don’t go up there.

I created my own bike map to deal with the inaccuracies across Google Maps. I used my local knowledge (“ground truth”) and high-quality bike facility data from the Chicago Department of Transportation.

I also used contributions to OpenStreetMap, mainly for trails. I’ve been correcting and adding new bike lane data to OSM as CDOT installs them. View this area with OpenCycleMap’s tiles, which shows only bike lanes on 18th Street.

If you’re an editor on Google’s Map Maker data editing platform, please correct these errors. I would do it except that Google doesn’t allow others to benefit from my data contributions like OpenStreetMap does, where anyone can give and take. (I also had a negative experience on Map Maker, getting myself into a tiff with an unnamed user who disagreed with my changes, based on a personal visit to the location, that were not visible on the satellite imagery because that location had outdated imagery.)

 

San Francisco is an expensive place to get around

October 9, 2013 / / 6 Comments

$8.15 if you want to exit the San Francisco airport via public transit.

In June I visited friends in San Francisco and attended the State of the Map US conference. I spent a lot of money on transit and bicycle rentals. This doesn’t exclude the cost of driving to Davis, California.

BART

Airport to 16th/Mission: $8.15
Union City to North Berkeley: $4.10
16th/Mission to Berkeley (roundtrip): $7.60
16th/Mission to airport: $8.15

I needed to travel from Stanford University (where my friend Stefano does research) to Berkeley (to visit Rock The Bike) and the cheapest and soonest way to get there was to take the Dumbarton Express bus across the lower San Francisco Bay to the Union City BART station. 

Dumbarton Express
Bus from Stanford to Union City BART: $2.10

Caltrain
22nd Street to Stanford (Mountain View): $7.00 (Google Maps says it would cost $21.99 to drive this trip)
Stanford (Mountain View) to 4th/King: $7.00

Total for 8 transit trips: $44.10

In Chicago, if I had taken all trips individually (no transfers), my cost would be about $31.75. To compare Caltrain to Metra, I calculated the cost of a trip from downtown Chicago to Geneva, which is $6.75 each way. This includes the $5.00 trip cost to get out of O’Hare airport, significantly less than BART’s $8.15.

I didn’t ride Muni trains (they’re kind of slow compared to bicycling) but I took a lot of photos of them arriving at Duboce Park. 

Bicycling

Bike rental in Davis, California for 3 hours: $10
Bike rental via Spinlister for 4 days: $72

This is the Surly Long Haul Trucker I rented via Spinlister, seen on the BART train in the roomy bike spot. For the most part, the bike can rest here without any securement. 

This is the charge I’m least concerned with, except that Spinlister charges me a 12.5% service fee). I also picked it up in Stanford because that’s where the bike owner lived; it was the best alternative of the available bikes for people my height as it was a bike I liked (Surly Long Haul Trucker) and it was $16 per day, the cheapest by $9 per day!

Part of the OpenStreetMap conference included a trip to the California Academy of Sciences on the Friday before the meetings started. The SCUBA diver on the left is cleaning the glass while the diver on the right is talking to the museum worker outside the pool. 

Not having a bicycle in a place I visit makes me feel naked. Having the bicycle reduced my potential fees on getting around. I had to move from my friend’s house to the OpenStreetMap conference (which would have required two transit trips or a taxi), between the conference and downtown for the World Naked Bike Ride, and between the conference and Sunday Streets in Dog Patch and Mission Bay. I also biked to Golden Gate Park to visit the California Academy of Sciences, pedaled over to see the Aether shop made with three shipping containers, joined SF Bike Party on Friday night, and biked around Berkeley to see Paul Freedman at Rock The Bike.

I left the OpenStreetMap conference during Sunday’s lunch to check out Sunday Streets. Even though I sold my Yuba Mundo for a WorkCycles Fr8, I love seeing families on cargo bikes.

Creating a bike map for Richmond, Indiana

August 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

A cycle map of Richmond, Indiana, before I added the city’s signed routes as a “relation”.

I visited Richmond, Indiana, in early August with my friend who grew up there. There isn’t much to do there, but there are a lot of neat places to bike to. Richmond had more features mapped than I expected, but I was happy to contribute via Pushpin and JOSM. With Pushpin OSM, an app for iOS, I added a couple of venues I visited, including Firehouse BBQ & Blues.

With JOSM, though, I wanted to add the city’s bike routes so they would appear in OpenCycleMap and could then be immediately embedded as a (somewhat) interactive map on the Bike Richmond website. I asked a city planner for a bike map and he gave me a GIS printout that showed the “recommended routes” (which are unsigned) and then he drew on the signed route that augment the recommended routes. The signed route essentially creates a loop.

I tagged all of the recommended routes as “bicycle=designated”. After the tiles in OpenCycleMap updated to include my work in Richmond I realized that OCM doesn’t symbolize “bicycle=designated” unless they’re in a relation. I created a relation, calling it the “City of Richmond Signed Bike Route“.

The new cycle map of Richmond, Indiana. 

This was cross-posted to my OpenStreetMap diary. My next project for OSM in Richmond is to map all the murals with the tag “tourism=artwork”. The mural below was designed by my friend, Ryan Lakes. There are murals painted on the sides of many buildings. One motif is to paint realistically, so it appears that the building really has the Wright brothers bicycle shop.

Mural in two-point perspective. 

A painted fire on the side of Firehouse BBQ & Blues.