Category: Maps

Mapping a campground that doesn’t exist: a before and after view of OpenStreetMap

December 27, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Pretty soon there will be a campground shown in OpenStreetMap, and added to its geocoding database, when I’m done adding it.

I temporarily become addicted to mapping places on OpenStreetMap. In my quest to find and map all campgrounds in Chicagoland – in order to publish them in the Chicago Bike Guide – I came across a campground that was constructed this year and opened in August 2013. This is the story of figuring out how to map the Big Rock Forest Preserve campground in Big Rock, Illinois.

I found on the Kane County Forest Preserve District website that the organization operated a campground at Big Rock Forest Preserve. I couldn’t locate the campground in Google Maps by the address the website gave. I couldn’t find it in OpenStreetMap, either, because no one had mapped it, but it’s there now.

When I searched for the park by name, Google Maps zoomed me to the main entrance of the park, but I still couldn’t see a campground. I downloaded the forest preserve district’s park map (always as a PDF) and followed the roads in Google Maps until I came across the campgrounds approximate position. There was a new road here so I followed that to find a campground under construction.

Google Maps shows the campground and artificial lake under construction.

Google’s imagery of the under-construction campground was taken on May 23, 2013 (get the date from Google Earth). This was great because now I could open JOSM, a powerful desktop OpenStreetMap editor, and locate the site, load Bing’s imagery and start tracing the campground to upload to OSM.

Bing’s imagery in JOSM, the OpenStreetMap-editing app, doesn’t show the campground.

The problem was that Bing’s imagery – and this is typical – was outdated. I could easily compare the imagery side-by-side and based on other landscape features (like the forest edge) guess where to trace the campground, but OSM needs better quality data. Enter MapWarper.

Read the rest of this post on Web Map Academy.

Compiling and mapping Chicago-area campgrounds

December 26, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’m adding Chicago-area campgrounds to the Chicago Bike Guide to entice new users and to espouse the enjoyment of medium-distance bike camping (which I’ve now done officially once, earlier this year).

<The Chicago Bike Guide is available for Android and iOS.>

I’m taking a systematic approach to finding all the publicly-owned campgrounds in the area by looking at primary sources.

First, though, I’ve used Overpass Turbo to create a list of all existing campgrounds in OpenStreetMap. You can see a gist of these places.

Camp sites at Greene Valley forest preserve I mapped.

Camp sites at Greene Valley forest preserve I mapped.

The next method is to find out which campgrounds are operated by the county forest preserves, which are usually well-documented on their respective websites. Then I will look at state parks in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, operated by states’ respective Departments of Natural Resources (DNR). Next I will look at national parks and finally commercial campgrounds.

The app will display campground information such as alcohol rules, if cabins or lodging is available, and how you can get there (which trails or train lines).

I’ve so far mapped the campgrounds in two ways, as nodes and as areas. At the Greene Valley forest preserve in DuPage County, for example, I’ve mapped the 11 individual camp sites (see map), but at Blackwell forest preserve in the same county, I’ve mapped the area as the camp site (see map).

Blackwell has over 50 sites in a discrete area and it’s more efficient to map them as a single node, while Greene Valley had far fewer sites but scattered over a couple areas.

Cross-posted to Web Map Academy.

Google Maps’s lies are why I made my own bike map

October 22, 2013 / / 28 Comments
http://goo.gl/maps/BlIZF

Bright green lines indicate trails while darker green lines indicate bike lanes.

Because Google Maps lies about where bike facilities are. Check out the bicycling layer at 16th Street and Wood Street in Pilsen, Chicago, Illinois.

Google Maps bicycling layer legend

Google Maps bicycling layer legend

The bright green lines represent trails, but the ones in this part of Pilsen are not trails. All of the north-south “trails” you see are actually sidewalks underneath railroad viaducts. The east-west trails…well, I’m not sure what they are but they are on elevated railroad property. Don’t go up there.

I created my own bike map to deal with the inaccuracies across Google Maps. I used my local knowledge (“ground truth”) and high-quality bike facility data from the Chicago Department of Transportation.

I also used contributions to OpenStreetMap, mainly for trails. I’ve been correcting and adding new bike lane data to OSM as CDOT installs them. View this area with OpenCycleMap’s tiles, which shows only bike lanes on 18th Street.

If you’re an editor on Google’s Map Maker data editing platform, please correct these errors. I would do it except that Google doesn’t allow others to benefit from my data contributions like OpenStreetMap does, where anyone can give and take. (I also had a negative experience on Map Maker, getting myself into a tiff with an unnamed user who disagreed with my changes, based on a personal visit to the location, that were not visible on the satellite imagery because that location had outdated imagery.)

 

How to convert bike-share JSON data to CSV and then to shapefile

October 9, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Update January 4, 2013: The easiest way to do this is to use Ian Dees’s Divvy API as it outputs straight to GeoJSON (which QGIS likes). See below.

For Michael Carney’s Divvy bike-share stations + Census tract + unbanked Chicagoans analysis and map he needed the Divvy station locations as a shapefile. I copied the JSON-formatted text of the Divvy real-time station API, converted it to CSV with OpenRefine, and then created a shapefile with QGIS.

Here’s how to create a shapefile of any bike-share system that uses hardware from Public Bike System Co based on Montréal and is operated by Alta Bicycle Share (this includes New York City, Chattanooga, Bay Area, Melbourne, and Chicago): Continue reading

Divvy considers my suggestions in bike-share kiosk map redesign

October 8, 2013 / / 8 Comments

The new design that will appear at the newest stations first and then rolled out to all stations. 

I posted two months ago a critique of the Divvy bike-share maps, seen at 284 stations scattered around Chicago, focusing on the clutter of having so many maps (with the third being useless), unclear labels and labels that covered map objects, and the low prominence of the smartphone app and map legend. Two weeks ago the Divvy public relations manager emailed me a screenshot of the new map design and said that these points had been changed. He said they considered four of my suggestions:

  1. Make CycleFinder, the official Divvy smartphone app, more prominent
  2. Change “You are here” design to make it clear where you are
  3. Make streets and streets’ label text smaller
  4. Removed service area map and make legend more prominent

I replied to the manager and suggested that the “You are here” label be made slightly transparent to show that the road does continue beneath it.

Close-up of the original “you are here” design that covered up other objects and wasn’t centered in the walking distance circle.