BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

can't google do this? are there no bike riders in the local office to push this along? how hard is it to put those cameras on top of a recumbent?

They're already using bike mounted rigs in other areas so it's possible.

http://gizmodo.com/5255361/google-street-view-employs-high+tech-tricycles-for-hard+to+reach-places

However, last I knew, it wasn't Google themselves who were doing the mapping but several companies that they were contracting to do it.

That being said, I do have a GIS nerd streak as well and might be interested in helping out with the effort.

I've been meaning to get involved in OSM but just haven't done it yet, so count me in, maybe.

The company with the OSM event was (is) deeplocal in East Liberty

Depending on what specifically OSM would need us to do, I wonder if we could do something like running MapMyRide (http://www.mapmyride.com/) and then uploading the route info. (I do see that they have options to display them on Google Earth which should mean that you can grab the kml layer data.)

Hmm...

HI. I was the instigator of the OSM mapping party. Here's what you can do: First, ride with a GPS receiver turned on and tracking your ride at the best resolution available (typically once per second). Second, upload your GPS track (which you can typically get in GPX format) to OSM.org. Tag it as a bicycle ride. That alone is a help, and doesn't have much of a learning curve.

Beyond that, we need cycleways entered. These can be in the form of rail-trails, or dedicated bicycle paths. They're typically not in OSM because most of the data we have was imported from TIGER. Further, we need bicycle lanes on streets tagged as cycleway=lane. And we need really bad bicycle roads to be tagged with bicycle=no. That will prevent bicycle routing programs from sending you down one of these streets.

I'm planning to return to Pittsburgh to run another mapping party in late August; very likely the 29th and 30th.

My email is russ@cloudmade.com if you want to walk further about this.

Oh, and the reason not to use Google Maps is right here: http://opencyclemap.org/ -- can't do that with Google Maps!

Russ, I was sorry to miss that mapping party. Quite a while ago I got interested in OSM and examined the OSM/TIGER data -- it was a little disconcerting to find it consistently offset by tens of meters w.r.t. my own GPS, and I wasn't sure I could go about applying the "right" large-scale correction to the data. I subscribed to the TALK-US mailing list but I'm afraid I haven't paid much attention to any of this stuff in a year or more.

Good to hear, though, that a simple GPX hi-res track upload is useful. I'll do that, and look forward to the next mapping party.

Nate

Russ & all:

I got a decent start on this a couple days ago. I added street connections to the pre-existing Jail Trail trace and did some corrections to the South Side as well as adding the South Side Works, South Side Trail (traced off of satphotos & by memory, so a GPS trace there would be good), and Hot Metal bike bridge.

Things that'd be worth doing:

• Get a GPS trace of more of the North Shore trail, as what's there is incomplete and I don't remember the connections well enough nor can I see them well enough through the trees


• Check the street connections on the North Shore trail


• Tag the new bike lanes in Squill


• Maybe get a GPS trace of the South Side trail, as I'm not sure how good my tracing was. It's accurate to my memory at least.

You know, sometimes when I read this message board, and I see the comments about the parties, I feel kind of old and out-of-touch.

Then I read stuff like this, and I think, "Hey! I'm not the nerdiest person here after all!" Thanks, guys.