Bing Aerial Refresh

In fall of last year the Bing aerial imagery of Springfield, IL was refreshed, finally fixing a huge north/south tear down the middle of the city that had made adding accurate geometry within it nearly impossible. The new imagery is from that summer and is absolutely fantastic. It even covers outlying towns like Chatham, Rochester, Riverton, and Spaulding. I’ve been hard at work fixing alignment problems and adding new roads and buildings that I had heard about but hadn’t had a chance to survey. This and the pandemic are largely responsible for taking me over 270 mapping days last year, a personal best.

Accessibility

I’m not really hardcore about adding individual parking spaces, but when I saw the iD preset for accessible parking spaces I knew it was something I could and should add whenever possible. As a result, over 5,400 accessible parking spaces in the Springfield metro area are now mapped, accounting for more than half of those mapped in the United States as of this post.

I’ve been pretty good about denoting accessible crosswalks, even those with tactile pavement, but I definitely need to do another pass through some neighborhoods now that the imagery has been updated. The city does have a rather robust sidewalk/crosswalk improvement program and there are probably dozens of walkways that have been upgraded since I last mapped them all. Additionally, I’d like to be more fastidious about adding entrances to buildings/businesses so that distances can be determined between them and their associated accessible parking spaces.

Roadway Detail

For the longest time I was hesitant to delve into adding lane information for segments of roads, because… well, I just didn’t like the idea of splitting roads into a bunch of different segments. I thought it would make it more tedious to update speed limits and things like that going forward.

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It was pretty early into my OSM mapping “career” that I heard about Maproulette. At the time I was too hyper-focused on getting my hometown of Springfield, Illinois squared away to worry about the rest of the map, and I assumed most of the challenges would be beyond my skill level at the time anyway. But yesterday as I was reading through weeklyOSM 525 I was led to the latest Maproulette updates. Having only a vague awareness of it, nothing in the list of new features necessarily excited me, but it reminded me of how unsure of myself I was 4 years ago and how much I’d learned since then. So I decided to give it a shot.

The challenge I’ve really taken to is Duplicate Roads Across North America, which is comprised of a surprising variety of tasks. Many are simply instances of duplicate geometry being imported en masse from TIGER or the like - very easy to disentangle and correct. On the opposite end of the difficulty scale are ways that are parts of complex relations like multiple bus routes, and I immediately “nope” the hell out of those when I see them, lest I screw things up royally.

It’s also interesting to see the mistakes of previous users. Sometimes it’s a simple mis-click just too far from an intersection node. Other times it comes down to sheer laziness, like the many, many instances of users creating multiple parking aisles by using a single way to snake up and down the parking lot, drawing over existing ways on the perimeter. Usually the easiest way to deal with those is to “nuke the snake” and redraw each individual parking aisle, and more often than not you’re adding in one-way directionality that the original editor never included, so you feel like you’re not just fixing something, but adding something.

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In April of 2019 I became the transit planner for Sangamon Mass Transit District in Springfield, Illinois. This was a natural transition for me because I’d already been there for over a decade in an IT capacity and had intimate knowledge of how our schedules were run and, more importantly, how they needed to be represented digitally for public consumption.

About 4 years prior to this I managed to cobble together our first GTFS export that allowed passengers to navigate the system using Google Maps, Bing Maps, Here Maps, Moovit, and any other application that used GTFS information. Even though we weren’t broadcasting live data, the ability to retrieve static schedules via any serviceable smartphone made a huge impact and dramatically cut down on phone calls to our dispatchers - who now, ironically, almost exclusively reference the data as presented in Google Maps to give customers information anyway.

When I constructed our GTFS feed I searched far and wide for any and all applications or services that allowed me to submit it to them, and I vigorously tested each of them against each other to make sure our data wasn’t being misinterpreted or misrepresented. More often than not, any errors I found were the result of ambiguous data in the GTFS itself and not a failing on the part of the interpreter. So I refined and restructured and recalculated to remove any and all ambiguity, and I continue to do so every time I update it, even if it’s just a matter of moving the coordinates for a bus stop a few feet and recalculating the stop distances of multiple routes. I’m the authority on the information and I want it to be the best it can possibly be.

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