I’ve been a geography nerd for my entire life. Recently, I’ve gotten into OSM as part of my need to map bike lanes for an advocacy article on bike lanes.

Initially, I mapped manually using Mapbox studio. Yes, it was tedious.

A bit more research led to OSM. I checked ways to pull down bike lane tags. That led me to the world of OverpassQL, with Overpass Turbo and the Overpass API. Along the way, I also got a taste of tagging with the need to find bike related infrastructure. Apparently, all the tags here apply:

• bike=
• cycleway=
• cycleway_left=
• cycleway_right=
• cycleway_both=

Quite fun.

I managed to put my query together. Google Gemini search AI tried to be helpful with query suggestions. It was of limited accuracy.

After realizing that some infrastructure was missing, I had to consider maintenance of my underlying data. With OSM being an open source project, I decided to become a contributor.

The iD webapp was too limited for me. I’ve worked extensively with ArcMap before. JOSM was my tool of choice.

That leads me to today. I found additional bike maps (cycleOSM) that were nice but not illustrative enough. I also made my first updates to OSM. JOSM certainly has a learning curve but it’s mild.

I’ll still be making my own queries and I still plan to use Mapbox for my visualization. Will also have to test out Esri’s visual storytelling features.

More to come.