I know it’s been about two years since I’ve written an entry in here. Truth is that I haven’t been mapping as much as I used to and inclined to write about it even less.

That said I haven’t been completely idle:

• Added more details to Vermillion Regional Airport in Danville, Illinois. Having been a member of the Illini Glider Club allowed me to do that since I was going there pretty much every weekend. Unfortuntely I had to give it up when I became unemployed in November of 2020, but I’ve been at my new job for almost 6 months now and I plan on rejoining sometime between mid-July and early August.
• I added the bike lanes and sharrows along Main Street in Urbana from downtown to the Kickapoo Rail Trail. I did this over a year ago and was surprised no one else had done it since it’s the main connector between the rail trail and the rest of the bike routes in the Champaign-Urbana area.
• Cleaned up/added the bike lanes and sharrows in downtown Champaign. I added the bike lane along Walnut Street (which unfortunately doesn’t have one going in the opposite direction on one of the adjacent streets, unless you count State Street, which I don’t), added the bike lane along Clark St/Logan St, removed the bike trail marking along Clark St west of Randolph since it’s not marked with signs or pavement markings (it’s marked as one in the Champaign County Bikes map only)
• Added more maxspeed and minspeed tags in Iowa and Illinois. Besides the motorways I’ve been paying attention to US 30 in and east of Cedar Rapids, IA 38, and IA 130. A hint for other mappers who want to add maxspeed tags for highways that go through small towns: like Pennsylvania the speed limits in Iowa tend to change in or near the city limits of these towns, though Iowa’s a bit more flexible than Pennsylvania is. Also, adding minspeed tags to the Interstates in Iowa and Illinois is easy since you can just download and select all the members of the route relations for them and add them that way.

As far as what others have done that I’m watching, that mainly applies to the construction of the I 80/I 380/US 218/IA 27 turbine interchange near Coralville. I’m still surprised that IowaDOT went with a turbine instead of a cloverstack, which has been their historic favorite. I would have gone for keeping the cloverleaf but adding collector/distributor lanes myself, similar to what OhioDOT’s been doing and to the I 74/US 150 interchange in Danville, Illinois (and which I wish ILDOT would convert older cloverleaf interchanges into).

I’ll also be moving to west Champaign in a couple of months. This means I’ll be focusing less on downtown and more on the area near Parkland College, including more of the Greenbelt Bikeway. Most of the changes I made there were made when I worked in that part of the city. Once I move I’ll have even more time to focus on that area since I’ll be living there.