A lot of the counties around here provide publicly available building footprints. Mine doesn’t. Inspired by some of the more rigorous OSM efforts that exist in the broader community, I am committing myself to my home community of Racine.

Beginning with the City around me and broadening out, I’m going to work on getting all our buildings added to OSM, and fix some of the validation errors lurking in the data. Seems our local editors like to combine landuse ways with highways, but the common convention is that this is incorrect. Lots of ungluing to do. Other things, too.

An effort like this needs its own hashtag, I think. So: #DigitizeRacine

We’ll start with rough building footprints, just to get everything on the map. Later, house numbers, porches, more specific tags, all that. But for now, I’m just going to churn out some rectangles.

Edit: also seems that the landuse areas will, at their corners, follow the curb. But why follow one curb and say “landuse doesn’t include the street”, and then completely cover whole swathes of other streets? I’m going to break them up into block-sized areas. I’m of the opinion that this is more information, too, as it gives the actual curb locations.