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.

Well, last year I finally took plunge and I estimate Springfield is at least 95% complete in that regard. Does it make things more tedious to add more detail later? I’ve been adding snowplowing info for our emergency snow routes recently and yeah, it’s a bit tedious, but at a certain point you just need to accept that more detail is going to require more work, that it’s not going to be a convenient couple of clicks. Only makes the sense of accomplishment more pronounced, if you ask me.

I’m not saying everyone should start doing this immediately. But once you feel comfortable, when you’re doing your umpteenth pass over your local area and wondering what more you can add, it’s an interesting project to take on. You’ll learn a lot about your city.

Cycling

I’m no cyclist, but I recently picked up an escooter for quick trips to the store and to commute to work, and since there’s some overlap in regards to infrastructure and amenities, I’ve been plugging away at updating what I can. Bike paths and lanes were already more or less squared away before I came along, but amenities like racks or stands, not so much. But now I can say that OSM is the most accurate source of that information for Springfield than any other. That isn’t to say it’s complete, mind you! Just that I’ve cataloged enough to surpass the “official” maps of cycling amenities available from the city and local cycling groups.

I see this taking me down an entirely new rabbit hole. The cycling infrastructure in Springfield is severely lacking and when I commute to work I find myself opting to take my scooter down alleys in hopes of minimizing interaction with vehicle traffic. I did a substantial amount of planning before attempting my first commute on the scooter and I thought I had determined the perfect route, but it turns out vehicle traffic doesn’t hold a candle to the real enemies: smoothness and incline. I had seen those tags before but did not fully appreciate what they represented until I had to deal with them. There are some astoundingly wretched alleyways around here and they absolutely need those tags added to them.

Smoothness seems straightforward (though a bit subjective) but incline I’ll have to do some digging on to figure out how to record properly. If anyone knows of tools/gadgets to get the job done, let me know. I’m willing to spend some money on it.

Public Transit

As the transit planner at SMTD you’d think I’d be all over this, but - and I think I said this in a previous entry - my personal opinion is that if there’s an existing GTFS feed for a transit agency in an area then they shouldn’t be mapped in OSM, and OSM-based apps should instead pull from those feeds. It’s cleaner and more timely than relying on some random user to update OSM to reflect changes to routes. Not to mention, OSM will never be able to do what GTFS-realtime does, for obvious reasons.

That said, I did stumble upon this project that facilitates the synchronization of transit stops between GTFS and OSM and it looks promising. I love the idea of being able to upload our stops directly to OSM and being able to get subsequent additional info via OSM edits that we can then pull back into our data. I see the utility in that and if anything I’d like to up the ante: do the same for the rest of the GTFS feed. If I could fully replicate/sync our static GTFS in OSM via an automated/batch process I would integrate it into my workflow in a heartbeat.

Odds & Ends

Let’s see… another thing I’ve been getting into is denoting lamp_mount for highway=street_lamp. Downtown Springfield has a curious mix of bent_mast and a much smaller straight_mast and I was curious to see the distribution. I’ve kinda just been updating these as I go along. Once it gets to the point where I’m rarely running into lamp_mount tags I’ll run an Overpass query to find the stragglers and I knock them out but I have a feeling it’s going to be awhile; I’ve added over 15,000 of them.