OpenStreetMap
Hi folks,
I’m documenting my quest to add all the bike racks in Chicago to OSM. So far I’ve added about 200+ bike racks in the Lakeview area + the Loop. It’s been pretty easy to do so far, you just go out and walk around a bit then add points for all the bike racks. Always looking for folks to help out!
Discussion
Comment from kzbssehb on 30 September 2022 at 23:53
This is already quite the achievement, nice mapping!
Chicago technically publishes this information on https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/cdot/dataset/bike_racks.html
It might be possible to do a first pass using this data to get points on the map but I wouldn’t know where to start.
Comment from kzbssehb on 30 September 2022 at 23:55
I bet osm.org/user/Steven%20Vance would be into this or know someone who would.
Comment from epicspongee on 1 October 2022 at 16:28
The data points that the city publishes are a great starting point, but are very spotty. I think the city records where each bike rack is by address, which isn’t always the most accurate. On top of that, the geocoder used for that public dataset didn’t have the most accurate points. I got a more updated set of bike racks here and put them into Google My Maps, using their geocoder to make everything happen. That should be a bit more accurate, but still not great.
Mapillary will extract bike rack locations from images automatically. I think what I’m going to do is use the bike rack map to get an idea of where I need to ride, and then take 360 photos and upload them to Mapillary so it can extract bike rack info. Then I can map those into OSM faster.