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.
There are some other weird rooftop happenings nearby, like this TNT advertisement in Bing.
Man on the roof
He just watches from this commercial building in Lennox.
Little Green Mazdas
Maybe it’s a body shop that only does green cars near Hawthorne?
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.
So many roaches!
Here’s an unfortunate house tented up for fumigation.
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?
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.
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.
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.