Ian,

Happy to see you’ll be “on board” again

AndrewSnow

Thank you for awesome update. Really appreciate having a functioning preset search. Am frequently walking the streets of San Francisco mapping multiple blocks at a time in Vespucci. I had made a cheat sheet in OneNote of some of the more obscure ones, or would just tag the POI name in the field and add the full preset later in JOSM. The new version is going to help eliminate a lot of that. Looking forward to the opening hours editor! In JOSM, I rely on the plugin to get the syntax correct. Thank you again.

I would like to ask that this be very carefully considered before proceeding. I have done a lot of work to micromap business districts and homes in SF, particularly in the West Portal - Inner Sunset areas and SOMA around 8th and Folsom using Vespucci in the field and the City’s website for visual reference.

I foresee a number of SF specific issues with an import:

• While the Mapbox drawn building outlines are a big improvement over those available from CCSF, they are not particularly well aligned to Bing. In general, I often need to move entire blocks 10 to 15 feet in order align them to the image reference we are generally expected to use.

• The Mapbox team frequently combined adjacent flat roofed buildings into a single building. When I am adding addresses, I first find I need to sub-divide the buildings in order to represent the condition on the ground.

• San Francisco buildings are narrow by California standards (typically 25-30’ widths) but will often have 3 or more addresses within that width. Small spatial errors either the address database or in the Mapbox building outline are going apply the wrong address to many, many buildings.

• The SF Planning address registry has addresses that have no physical presence on the building. Likely these were assigned to suites that have now been combined into larger spaces.

• San Francisco OSM already has a lot of addresses. It’s in patches and pieces, but aside from the neighborhoods I have worked on, there are large sections of the Castro, Noe, along Church and in strips of downtown, and along Geary that are done to a high level of detail. You can see this at OSM Inspector or using the QA tool.

• SF does suffer from a lot of drive-by mapping where folks enter a housenumber, but nothing else. OSM Inspector shows these too - I cleared several dozen of these a few nights back. Several have multiple driveby entries a few feet apart for the same address. If we import, we are just going to add another layer that needs to be reconciled with the existing problems.

Instead, what I have been doing on and off for the last couple of months is to enter house numbers from the SF planning website and then hit the streets with Vespucci for the business districts and where the website records are ambiguous. I started at West Portal Boulevard and am working a strip northward toward GGP. It’s the most tedious thing I’ve done on OSM, but I have managed to get ~1400 addresses entered this way, and I have high confidence in the results. You can see the small dent I am making at either OSM Inspector or qa.poole.ch.

What I would love to see done with the SF address shape file is to produce an OSM/GPX layer we could open in JOSM to view while manually editing. The cursor in the CCSF is too large - you frequently get the result for the adjacent building - having this same information available in the JOSM edit window might speed things up tremendously.

By contrast, I have thought that many parts of Marin County would be ripe for import. The Marin County GIS building outlines are excellent, the degree of tree cover in the neighborhoods makes digitizing them from Bing mostly impossible, and there are large areas where there have been no local addresses or buildings entered (last I checked).