This week I added tagging to the Regina area for the following:

• Presence / location of sidewalks
• Presence / location of on street parking
• Number of road lanes
• Turn lane designations

None of this gets rendered on any of the default map layers, so the map doesn’t look any different. It could be helpful for routing software. For cycling I prefer to avoid roads that don’t have a parking lane. I also prefer to turn left at intersections that have a dedicated lane and not be stopped in a driving lane relying on drivers behind me paying attention.

The Lane and Road Attributes, and Sidewalks map paint styles in JOSM are very helpful in visually confirming the tags are added correctly. For bidirectional ways you need to pay attention to the direction arrow to determine whether to use turn:lanes:forward or turn:lanes:backward.

Lately I’ve been using uMap to map the local fat bike trails to let local riders know where they are. The trails are just snow so they can get buried by more snow and shift position when re-groomed or abandoned. Come spring they melt away.

I like that I can do most of my gpx line editing in JOSM then import to uMap for final formatting.

http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/regina-fat-bike-trails-winter-20202021_538851#12/50.4510/-104.5992

The City of Regina has a WMS tile server for their biennial aerial ortho photography. I was using it recently to add tagging for multi-use pathways with lighting. I got to an area where I knew there was some lighting but the imagery was too orthogonal to spot the light poles. Then I remembered the oblique imagery captured at the same time can be viewed through their open data website. The oblique imagery lets you view any area of the city from 4 different angles, which made it easy to confirm the presence of lighting.

In some cases the oblique imagery is in better focus, revealing more details. The angle also makes it easier to spot small things like waste baskets, or items hidden below trees.

https://opengis.regina.ca/PictometryIPA/ReginaIPA.aspx?lat=50.48963991766781&lon=-104.68135085472443

I saw a local twitter post last night from someone lamenting the lack of road surface indication on Google Maps when a planned bike route suddenly went from asphalt to gravel and sand. I replied with the inelegant suggestion of an Overpass query to highlight just the paved roads. Though a route planning map that visually indicates road surface would be really nice (I’m looking at you RideWithGPS!)

I quickly noticed in the query results unpaved roads without a surface tag, which provided me with my next editing task. With a relatively small percentage of local roads without surface tags I was able to pull fairly large areas into JOSM using an Overpass Turbo query for just those roads.

highway=* and highway!=service and surface!=*

I’m excluding service roads to exclude a multitude of rural driveways and other short terminal roads. By adding a filter (surface=*) the roads I update disappear from view once I provide a surface for them making for an easy workflow.

The CANVEC imports I did for Saskatchewan roads back in 2014 included road surface, so it was mostly the hand drawn pre-2014 roads I need to add surfaces to.

One thing to watch out for. Since you aren’t downloading everything, deleting a road may delete nodes shared by roads that haven’t been downloaded. This will generate conflicts that need to be resolved when doing an upload. Resolve the conflict by selecting that the state of the affected node should be “not deleted”. Unfortunate it only detects conflicts one at a time instead of detecting all of them, so you may need to restart the upload / resolve conflicts multiple times.

The city had announced their preference to award the contract to the last company that did it. But another company filed an objection. No time to re-tender before the leaves open, so the project is canned for this year.

I saw a tender put out for new aerial imagery for Regina. It looks like the city is keeping with their recent pattern of re-imaging the city every 2 years. The images are usually acquired early to mid April before the tree leaves open.

Should be available for JOSM editing in a few months to add buildings constructed in the past year.

I recently stumbled upon Osmose which is helping me track down errors from my early days of editing.

Back in early 2014 I did quite a few CANVEC imports in southern Saskatchewan and didn’t notice immediately that my workflow was introducing problems. Rather than upload the entire CANVEC layer in JOSM, I was selectively copying element classes to a new layer. I didn’t realize that by doing that I was breaking multipolgons and introducing duplicate inner polygons and duplicate overlapping nodes. Once I noticed the problem I switched to a pruning approach, but had no easy way to locate what needed fixing.

67,000 issues to work though, but I’m optimistic there is quite a lot of overlap within that list. Fixing a single duplicate polygon could also clear up a dozen duplicate node issues at the same time.

I’ve been re-riding my city by bicycle this year. My goal was to visit more of the roads I typically ignore. My progress has been much faster than I expected due to extended cold weather keeping me in the city instead of riding out on the highway.

JOSM is great at displaying multiple GPS traces at once. I even managed to load up all 1,400 of mine though it took some time.

I saved a local copy of the road network in an .osm file and have been crossing off roads in JOSM as I visit them. I’ve come across a few unmapped roads and paths on my journeys while doing this. The first time I rode the city back in 2014 I found hundreds of unmapped service roads.

Using the pruned road network file I use mkgmap to create a map overlay for my Garmin that shows me roads I haven’t covered yet this year which I update after each ride. I also have a second overlay that shows me roads I’ve never been down of which there are about 25 km, mostly high speed roads with no shoulder.

Picture represents about 3,500 km of riding for the year so far.

The City of Regina added 7.5 cm ortho air photos of the city from early May 2018 to their open data website. I contacted them about enabling WMS so I could use the imagery in JOSM and they were happy to oblige.

Their server is slow serving up imagery so you may want to turn it on and off while panning to a new location. I checked the alignment with the surveyed road centerline dataset and it is dead center for the most part. Some areas such as around the university are a bit off, so don’t go moving all the roads to match the imagery.

The Bing imagery for the area is newer, but this imagery is much more detailed with flat lighting and no shadows.

Adding Image Server to JOSM

https://opengis.regina.ca/arcgis/rest/services/CGISViewer/Airphoto_Regina_2018_7_5cm/ImageServer

The get capabilites URL needed for setting up the imagery in JOSM is the WMS link in the upper left.

• Go into the imagery preferences in JOSM and click the +WMS icon
• Paste the GetCapabilities url in the top box
• Click Get Layers (for me the window was too small and hid the layer selection box, I needed to drag the edge of the window to enlarge it)
• Select the Airphoto layer
• Select the Is layer properly georeferenced? (it is … mostly)
• Enter a friendly name for the imagery
• Press OK

Glad they finally dumbed down JOSM for us Canadians.

One of my cycling goals this year is to mix up the roads I ride and fill in my 2019 Personal Heatmap on Strava. I wanted a way to see unvisited roads on my Garmin while I was out so I decided to make a custom map overlay using some of the great tools available to the OpenStreetMap community.

I started by using the Download from Overpass API feature in JOSM to download the complete road network for my city and saved the layer to a file. Then I opened all my cycling GPS traces for 2019 and started pruning any road from the network that I had already covered.

I was optimistic that I’d be able to somehow automate the matching of GPS traces to lines in QGIS but I wasn’t able to figure out how to do it. Since the gps trace is either to the left or right of the road center line, one would need to create a function that walks the trace matching roughly parallel roads within a certain radius, while ignoring roads that are crossed perpendicularly. The v.select function I tried didn’t do either of those.

To generate the map overlay I cloned a style folder in mkgmap and created a stripped down lines file that applied the same style to all highway tags. I then edited a TYP file in TYPWiz to create a line of alternating transparent and white blocks that would be applied over any roads I haven’t visited.

With the mkgmap style setup I just need to run a batch file to generate a new overlay whenever I update the road network file.

Full instructions to create the overlay along with the mkgmap style can be found here (pdf): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k-uoqGkdmqwg4Qvl-Tt2rUa3VpfWx6Ie

When uploading building footprints for Regina SK last week I had a bit of an oopsie. I had completely forgot that for very large uploads JOSM can finish uploading and close a changeset yet not reflect this in the UI. The result is that it looks like it is still uploading and will continue to show this forever. So I hit cancel and started the upload again, but limiting it to chunks of 10,000 objects. Then while waiting for that upload I looked at the slippy map, and the objects were already there, doh!

A few times in the past I’ve come across huge swaths of untagged nodes, I guess this explains it.

I uploaded all the GPS traces I collected while systematically biking every road in Regina last year. It should be useful for newer areas until the satellite imagery gets a refresh.

Roads added after mid-July 2014 won’t have traces uploaded. I have traces for most of the new ones as I periodically bike through the areas under construction. But its a matter of figuring out which day I biked those roads. Its usually easier to just go back and ride them again.