I’m continuing on my quest to map all the bike racks in Chicago, but it’s going a bit slower than I thought. Last update, I had a little less than 200 racks mapped, which is pretty good progress. This update I’ve gotten to 306. Here’s a look:

I got a suggestion last time to try using data from the city to help map the racks. Unfortunately, the data from the city isn’t super accurate. It can be off by as much as 2 blocks using the map on the official website. So I got data that was a little more updated, stripped the locations from it (the geocoder used was inaccurate) and punched it into Google MyMaps to see how accurate it was. It’s better, but still not something I’d want to use for actual mapping.

Another approach I’ve tried is using Mapillary. I bought a 360 camera and recorded a few tracks around town. Supposedly they’ll automatically tag stuff using computer vision (bike racks included), but none of my sequences posted more than a week ago have been tagged yet.

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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!