OpenStreetMap

Weird things seen from above Los Angeles

Posted by schleuss on 7 September 2016 in English.

The L.A. County import team has brought in 1.3 million buildings and counting. The effort has been a large undertaking. It couldn’t have been done without help from Mapbox, the Los Angeles Times graphics/data teams, government cooperation and the 100+ contributor/volunteers. You should vote for our effort in the OpenStreetMap Awards. You can hop into the import by following this guide and picking a task from here.

Anyway, time to showcase the weird screenshots I’ve saved through the import.

Batman landing

This is near LAX. It appeared sometime in the last four years. bat-symbol

There are some other weird rooftop happenings nearby, like this TNT advertisement in Bing. tnt-advert

Man on the roof

He just watches from this commercial building in Lennox. roof-man 2

Little Green Mazdas

Maybe it’s a body shop that only does green cars near Hawthorne? green-cars 2

DTLA’s hexagon pool

The hexagon pool! Loved by the L.A. Time’s data desk meetings and added by our @palewire. It’s part of the 456-unit Bunker Hill Apartments and unfortunately closed to the public. hexagon-pools

So many roaches!

Here’s an unfortunate house tented up for fumigation. fumigate

So we burned it

And this house appears to still be smoldering after a fire. On closer inspection it looks too organized and uncharred to have just gone up in flames. Maybe it’s a bbq? fire

Iron? plane

Another satellite curiosity on the southwest corner of LAX. It appears surrounded by boards in Bing, Mapbox and the USGS Large Scale Imagery. iron-plane

And finally, Catalina Island’s bison

I knew we’d catch them at some point. Local mappers are planning a trip to the island and we’re cleaning up roads before the trip. Finally caught a group of the famous bison. catalina-bison-locator catalina-bison catalina-bison-2

Location: Civic Center, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, 90012, United States

Discussion

Comment from ramyaragupathy on 7 September 2016 at 09:37

Amazing catches! Thanks for sharing

Comment from Jonah Adkins on 7 September 2016 at 14:13

v nice. - iron plane @ lax and tons of other airfields are for fire / emergency training

Comment from skorasaurus on 8 September 2016 at 18:56

Nice catches, thanks for sharing - also enjoyed the talk in Seattle.

The green cars could be taxis or a fleet of government or business vehicles?

Comment from BushmanK on 9 September 2016 at 17:59

I can confirm that - rusty full-scale airplane model is a firefighting training range, and these are not boards surrounding it - these are hoses drying in the sun (I’ve never seen a 25 meters long board, flexible enough to be bent so freely). Worm-shaped dot figures in the retention reservoir on the other side of the road to the west look way more intriguing.

Comment from schleuss on 9 September 2016 at 19:41

Thanks gang. And yes @BushmanK someone on Twitter said it was for training too. And yeah, the worm things look like little structures don’t they?

Comment from BushmanK on 9 September 2016 at 20:33

@schleuss, Using Google Street View, you can see these dots are actually a kind of cones, similar to traffic cones, but they look brown, not orange. Have no idea what it is.

Comment from Bootprint on 10 September 2016 at 16:30

The green cars are with Bell Cab who have corporate offices on Cerise Ave.

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