When I moved to Ireland from Germany four years ago, I found it hard to adjust to the lack of public transport and the lack of transparency. I don’t have a driver’s license, so I kind of rely on it and I don’t mind it too much, even though it is inconvenient when there are only two buses a day. But this low frequency would require more transparency, IMHO, i.e. it should be easy to find out when and WHERE the buses leave. But no, that is a well kept secret in Ireland in my experience. Most rural bus stops have no signage whatsoever, so you have to rely on asking locals where the bus stop is. Or when you go somewhere, you have to ask the driver at arrival, where the bus stop for the return travel is. But you might forget. Or you might be shy. Or not speak the language.

Today, I went on a 15 min journey (yes, really far) on the bus. When I was waiting for it to arrive, I noticed two other companies’ coaches/ buses waiting. One of them serves the whole Republic and has a website, the other one not at all, at least I couldn’t find it. How do people know when the bus leaves, let alone where? I’m sure there are other people like me who want to travel eco-friendly, and, if they’re traveling as tourists, might want to meet locals by using public transport rather than hiring a car. (This was our means of transport, when I was traveling Turkey with two friends and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.)

The only way I see how to map the routes is actually take the bus and record all the stops and the route it takes. Really basic stuff, but I think it would make public transport more accessible. I’ve started today, but I only went as far as the first stop, so I’ll have to go the whole route another time.

Sometimes ways have duplicate nodes in them. I.e. instead of:

A-B-C

the node IDs are:

A-B-B-C

I’m unsure how this can happen. Probably a software bug in some OSM client. I’m not really into mapping but I always wanted to reduce the warnings we print and so I took the chance yesterday and fixed every single duplicated node (only in ways used as roads - which resulted in approx. 100 problematic ways).

It was rather easy to get rid of this as GraphHopper prints the problematic way IDs while the import and in JOSM you can download way information directly via Ctrl+Shift+O. Then you click Shift+V (Verify), then you click fix, then you click Ctrl+Shift+Up and Enter. I reviewed the result on openstreetmap.org again and proceeded with the next way (Ctrl+F4 to restart in JOSM). Sometimes multiple nodes were duplicated but then you only need to verify the way again, after you fixed it.

To my surprise and thanks to JOSM keyboard shortcuts, it took not even 2 hours :) … see all the changes here.

There were also 2 or 3 mappers who seemed to have the same goal and already fixed a few of these bugs.

Above is the coverage of 3 months of contributions by one mapper using MAPS.ME :/ and have added ONLY shop=bookmaker beneath power=pole.

… See full entry

Saw lots of masks littered along the way.

Also, saw lots of help wanted signs.

Cosmetics changes

Usually happen when the changes are mostly related to cosmetic features, like road realign, water features realign, tag upgrade, field upgrade, traffic sign upgrade, business details…

[Township/Town/City/County][State] cleanup (e.g. DuBois PA cleanup)

Related to changes within a specific area. Could be any type of changes.

[Township/Town/City/County][State] speed limit updates

Related to speed limit updates, could be multiple roads within a specific area

Add a chimney/Add a water tower/Add a building

All these features were added for mapping cell tower. My focus will never be buildings in this project.

Junk Removal

When I really cannot stand the crap (mostly complex relations) in the map so I delete everything and start from scratch.

Sometimes could be reverting others’ “contribution” (damage)..

—

All JOSM changesets will have detailed comments. All other changesets will be committed with purpose(s) in details. SAVE LIVES WRITE COMMENTS

Removed due to dated information

There is a place=city_block called New York (node 3,495,330,515) in Sweden (rel. 52,822) (admin_level=2), and there is a place=hamlet called Sweden (node 151,467,606) in Arkansas (rel. 161,646) (admin_level=4), and there is a place=hamlet called Arkansas (node 157,545,126) in West Virginia (rel. 162,068) (admin_level=4). That’s a chain of 3 places. I wonder how many there are in OSM… 🤔

I wrote a programme (osm-longest-place-boundary-includes) to look for long chains like this. I will leave my results in a comment on this, but before you look, guess at how long it will be. 😉

As of this week, I edited most buildings around Ialibu,Imbongu Electorate and Kagua District of SHP. Most of the location are not edited so I appended some structures and hydrologic features into OSM.

In the beginning of the year, I’ve been refactoring the Divide and map. Now.. I’ve already wrote about the clients and about the improvements. In this diary, I would like to share some details about how the server looks like now.

The damn project distributed architecture is depicted below. I’ll write about the api and db bubbles, where db is the PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS extension and the api is the python FastAPI application.

Damn server API

Automatically generated documentation of the API is useful for the developers of clients. There are some not so much interesting endpoints dealing with authentication and authorization, users updates, or squares GPXs. I will elaborate on /areas, /geometries, /area/AID, /area/AID/commits, and /area/AID/squares endpoints here.

… See full entry

My humble pandemic project has been to improve Anchorage, Alaska on osm. In the spirit of Isaac Newton in the time of the plague in London I would try and do a bigger push on a topic and while I didn’t invent the next calculus, I did improve Anchorage quite a bit. As we gently start coming out of the pandemic I figured it’s time to at least put a bow on this as a project and list improvements I’ve made that I’m proud of.

1. Adding buildings using the mapwith.ai
2. adding homeowner’s associations and neighborhoods
3. Adding natural features to the southern front range of Chugach State Park (woods, scrub, heath, scree, bare_rock).
4. Adding all sorts of trails (snowmachine trails north of big lake, hiking trails in chugach state park, connectors that were missed in kinkaid park, trails for smaller parks and HOAs in Anchorage, and little trail easements for elementary school access).
5. Adding retail, commercial, and industrial zoning.
6. Fixing TIGER import oopsies that have been around for a long time. Mostly streets that extend into woods that don’t really exist.
7. school details (playgrounds, ice rinks, sports fields)
8. lots and lots of parking
9. pockets of woods, wetland, and scrub in undeveloped large lots.
10. a pretty comprehensive meta tagging of totem poles with images.
11. natural features near airports
12. religious areas.

Some challenges remain:

1. golf and disc golf courses
2. the Alaska Zoo
3. quasi-neighborhoods that have no name
4. sidewalks, crossings, and footpaths in commerical areas.
5. filling out the zones in kinkaid that are somewhere between woods, scrub, and grass.
6. the woods that innervate neighborhoods.

In time, I feel society will view my additions on an equal merit with Newton’s quarantine achievements. /s

I’ve wanted to merge two ideas for a while. I did so a month or so back and wanted to share via a diary page (which is my sole programming blog outlet at this time).

I want to show a webmap that has overlapping isochrones where it shows the shortest distance between multiple zones. Now, this was sort of possible for me before with vectorized rings but I want it as a raster so I can show the spectrum of time it would take. It makes it more detailed and I think more pretty. Below is an example using the mapbox api for doing so. I assume like most web services it will be deprecated in the future but who knows.

… See full entry

We implemented the visualization of the facade visibility from neighbor streets within the Blender-OSM project. Green color on the image: facade is totally visible, red: facade is invisible, black: shared building wall. The other colors are used for in-between visibility states.

Blender-OSM is an open-source addon for Blender that creates city environments out of OpenStreetMap data. The addon source code is hosted on Github: the development version, the release version. To fund the addon development a version with assets is sold at https://gumroad.com/l/blosm

The visualization of the facade visibility from the neighbor streets is possible without even installing Blender.

Installation

• Download the addon code base from here
• Unpack it
• Rename the top folder from blosm-facade_visibility_demo to blosm
• Install some common Python packages:
  • pip install scipy
  • pip install mathutils
  • pip install matplotlib

Usage

… See full entry

The OpenStreetMap Foundation now offers a file management and collaborative writing platform based on Nextcloud:

https://files.osmfoundation.org

Up until now, working groups, committees, and the board have often relied on Google services for Foundation work. Based on the recommendations of the FOSS Policy Special Committee in a recent report, and at the initiative of the Local Chapters and Communites Working Group (LCCWG), the Board recently decided to deploy a Nextcloud Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solution as a privacy-friendly alternative.

The functionality of this software allows you to do:

• collaborative editing of rich text documents and spreadsheets (similar to Google Docs and Sheets)
• collaborative editing of simple text documents (similar to Etherpad and HackMD)
• management of files (similar to Google Docs)
• calendar sharing (similar to Google Calendar)

… See full entry

Hi!

To all of you who love to get out into the woods and sleep in shelters I have now updated the OSM GPX-extractor and fixed the autocomplete search function.

I also added more presets with barbecues and firepits so you can find the perfect picnic spot easily.

To all users of OsmAnd I want to point out that it recently? got a filter function where you can search for the type of shelter you are interested in. It still only supports showing one POI type on the map at the time so I prefer to have gpx waypoints for shelters in my phone for now.

Have a nice day

The OSM user experience is inextricably linked, i.e. dependent on the density of information displayed on the map. Therefore, the ultimate goal for all dedicated mappers who want to optimise the user experience must be to increase the density and precision of information on OpenStreetMap.

Ever since my first smartphone 12 years ago, I have used Here as my offline maps mobile app for driving, public transport, walking and cycling. I use the driving mode for cycling because the cycling mode is useless. I have looked at other mobile maps over the years, but I have always returned to Here. One thing I noticed common to all the apps was Open Street Map in the credits.

When Here “upgraded” their online public transport mode with real time schedules, they broke the offline public transport routing. So, this time I decided to look for an offline “Open Street Map only” mobile app. I installed OsmAnd.

My experience of OsmAnd was disappointing. The map download took way too long. The number of settings are overwhelming. However, the biggest disappointment is the missing street numbers to make the app useful for directions. I did have one friends address on the map and the offline driving routing mode was excellent. The offline public transport mode routing was broken. The cycling and walking mode routing looks good, but untested by me.

I tried to add the address for my GPS location to the map, but this proved to be too difficult. Rather than complain about the missing data, I’ve decided I will try to contribute my local knowledge and my contact addresses to Open Street Map through openstreetmap.org. In time, I may even add my public transport routes. However, for now it’s back to using Here Wego maps until I add those addresses.

The Project

Most places on OSM are bare in terms of wooded areas, making the map have a distinct lack of greenery. With Harford County being my home county, I have made an effort to make it lush with wooded areas on OSM. This project is being done entirely out of self-satisfaction and I am encouraging others to participate! Not just in Harford County but in OSM as a whole. Yes, it is tedious, many hours of my life have gone into this project, but it can be relaxing and satisfying. For example, if you're having a bad day, or just want to relax, put on some music and go to work outlining wooded areas.

For my current progress, you can check out how green Harford County currently is here!

Please comment with any additions you've contributed to my project!

MapComplete is a simple editor for OpenStreetMap, with the goal of making it easy for anyone to contribute by focusing on specific themes. This is especially helpful for short mapping activities, where we couldn’t spend too much time on the editing tool itself, but would like to get the mapping going. Recently, Pieter posted a diary entry to celebrate the 500th MapComplete contributor to OpenStreetMap.

… See full entry

Not sure how to manage or edit. I just down loaded app ..but cant get any info. If anybody can help me.out that would be greatly appreciated.

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MCA office building