My humble pandemic project has been to improve Anchorage, Alaska on osm. In the spirit of Isaac Newton in the time of the plague in London I would try and do a bigger push on a topic and while I didn’t invent the next calculus, I did improve Anchorage quite a bit. As we gently start coming out of the pandemic I figured it’s time to at least put a bow on this as a project and list improvements I’ve made that I’m proud of.

1. Adding buildings using the mapwith.ai
2. adding homeowner’s associations and neighborhoods
3. Adding natural features to the southern front range of Chugach State Park (woods, scrub, heath, scree, bare_rock).
4. Adding all sorts of trails (snowmachine trails north of big lake, hiking trails in chugach state park, connectors that were missed in kinkaid park, trails for smaller parks and HOAs in Anchorage, and little trail easements for elementary school access).
5. Adding retail, commercial, and industrial zoning.
6. Fixing TIGER import oopsies that have been around for a long time. Mostly streets that extend into woods that don’t really exist.
7. school details (playgrounds, ice rinks, sports fields)
8. lots and lots of parking
9. pockets of woods, wetland, and scrub in undeveloped large lots.
10. a pretty comprehensive meta tagging of totem poles with images.
11. natural features near airports
12. religious areas.

Some challenges remain:

1. golf and disc golf courses
2. the Alaska Zoo
3. quasi-neighborhoods that have no name
4. sidewalks, crossings, and footpaths in commerical areas.
5. filling out the zones in kinkaid that are somewhere between woods, scrub, and grass.
6. the woods that innervate neighborhoods.

In time, I feel society will view my additions on an equal merit with Newton’s quarantine achievements. /s