OpenStreetMap

A year's difference, locally

Posted by bdhurkett on 20 September 2014 in English.

I’m not exactly why I did it at the time, but this day last year I saved a screenshot of my town in OSM. Today seems a good opportunity to see what difference a year has made - at least, in my little corner of the world.

Here’s the old one (2013-09-20) (full-size): Burnie in OSM a year ago

And new (2014-09-20) (full-size): Burnie in OSM today

It already had most of the streets and roads, though quite a few were unnamed or broken since the redaction. It didn’t occur to me to take a screenshot at a ‘closer’ zoom, as the biggest changes might not look too impressive here - the CBD has filled out with just about every building and shop included, there’s (almost) no named ways without their names, and there’s a lot of smaller detail like footpaths, BBQ areas, bus stops and turning restrictions. Houses and addresses have also started to appear, and most of the urban area has landuse types tagged. However, not everything has changed; the north area near the football oval is mostly blank (construction there having not yet finished, or progressed enough to mark) and the seaport only has a few items marked (presumably due to it being private property and somewhat hard to explore, and in my case not knowing appropriate tags for that kind of thing).

If I look further ahead and compare it to the other map services, considering the relatively small population contributing to OSM locally, it’s really doing quite well. There’s one spot in particular I’m “proud” of - the section of Bass Highway here underwent changes several months back, with several new roads and one less intersection, but neither Google or Bing Maps have updated to match reality (though Bing at least has almost-current imagery).

So. Not bad at all. But there’s still plenty to keep me occupied for another year or more…

Location: Christmas Hills, Circular Head, Tasmania, 7330, Australia

Discussion

Comment from DaCor on 20 September 2014 at 03:08

Nice work

I see you are starting to get into the fine grain building mapping in some residential areas too. You’ll be surprised by what you find once you start doing surveys of these areas especially if you plan on adding addresses

Best of luck, see you in a year ;)

Comment from bdhurkett on 20 September 2014 at 11:28

Thanks And definitely - house outlines are usually just traced from imagery but I’ve learnt to do a walk around first to make sure they still exist in the real world (or vice versa)! Still learning the ins and outs of addresses too, since there’s plenty of apartments/units and so on around here and numbers not matching at turning circles and so on. Makes for good exercise if nothing else!

Comment from DaCor on 20 September 2014 at 23:20

How I usually do it is map everything from aerial imagery first, then when I go to do a ground survey, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to add notes to specific buildings/features if you have them mapped already.

Are you on iphone or android?

Personally I use android and when I’m out and about I use a variety of different apps for different purposes

  • OSMTracker when I’m in the car, I use it for noting speed limits and major features that can be done safely while driving
  • OSMPad for collecting addresses. Very useful in that you can place the mapped info directly over the property its related to.
  • Keypadmapper is a very powerful app for collecting data when doing ground surveys. the only function its missing it the only one OSMPad has, which is why I use the two seperately, though it will be coming soon at which point Keypadmapper will be the best for data collection
  • Vespucci for on the go edits that are saved direct to OSM. I don’t use this too often as I prefer to gather as much as possible when surveying and do my editing at home, but it is very useful and under constant development so always getting better and more powerful

Comment from bdhurkett on 21 September 2014 at 10:49

Neither - Windows Phone! But when I’m out and about I usually just take a hand-size spiral notebook, a pen, and a camera - I can scribble faster than I can type, and a photo is usually faster than both (it helps that the thing has GPS so I can’t forget where I took them). Get back home, sort it out in JOSM. But to each their own of course.

I haven’t found a good solution for anything faster than walking pace though. I might have to look at OSM Tracker and see if I can find anything similar; the only option I’ve tried is recording audio/video with a dashcam-like device, but having to go through the whole thing to find data afterwards just takes too long.

Comment from DaCor on 22 September 2014 at 00:24

In that case, have a look at fieldpapers.org

It might suit your style of surveying

Comment from FTA on 31 October 2014 at 03:17

Very wonderful! I am from a small rural town, and so I was in a similar situation in my town being much more up to date than the commercial maps when I originally focused on it in OSM. Keep up the good work! There’s something so satisfying about seeing the before/after pictures after doing all that work.

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