Ancestors

Written by Alan Grant on 2025-01-14 at 19:08

In 2024 I did a lot of mapping of urban POIs in OSM. While I was worrying about 50% of potential POIs being unmapped or mismapped in a big city, rural areas have a much bigger problem.

Only 20km away, for example, the municipality of Almogía (population around 4k) was a POI desert until recently. The local health centre, bank, post office, library, and schools were all missing in OSM. So I tried to map as much as I could before starting a long hike.

[#]OpenStreetMap

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Toot

Written by Alan Grant on 2025-01-14 at 19:15

The difference in the "before" and "after" maps may not look spectacular here. But a couple of hours walking around a village mapping these key amenities is arguably a more important contribution than adding another missing hairdresser in a big city.

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Descendants

Written by Alan Grant on 2025-01-14 at 19:21

While using the "mapping party" tool to produce the "before and after" map above, I was amused by the contrast between my map and the examples used by @gedankenstuecke to illustrate use of the tool.

Venado Tuerto in Argentina is all straight lines and right angles. Almogía has hardly a single example of either of those things. In fact one of the other shortfalls of the existing mapping was that several mapped streets turned out to be flights of steps.

https://tzovar.as/binderized-map-comparisons/

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Written by Alan Grant on 2025-01-14 at 19:26

One thing I hadn't really appreciated until now is the way good mapping of buildings and addresses helps with POI mapping - even though they can be mapped independently in principle.

In Málaga where these things have been thoroughly mapped from official sources, I was able to place new POIs very accurately while surveying, using Everydoor with OSM as background.

In Almogía, with nothing but a vague residential polygon, I found had to adjust a lot of positions at home later.

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Written by Rihards Olups on 2025-01-14 at 19:16

@alan I guess a major difference is in the permanence of those objects.

Banks, post offices, libraries and schools do change, but much less frequently that most other businesses.

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Written by Alan Grant on 2025-01-14 at 19:29

@richlv Yes, I'm hopeful that most of my new POIs will still be OK if I don't make it back for a while.

(Of course as well as those worthy civic amenities, I did also add 1 hairdresser, 1 barber, and 1 beauty salon - just to keep up my tradition).

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Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-15 at 05:45

@alan yes!

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Written by Marcos Dione on 2025-01-14 at 20:30

@alan @gedankenstuecke one of the features of Argentina is that it's mostly FLAT. like Netherlands or Denmark flat. But for thousands of kilometers.

Córdoba is 700km away from the sea. It's 450m above sea level. There are no mountains or rolling hills between them. That means that most of the streets are straight. Also, Spaniards (and later Argentinians) drew very consistently in squares, maybe throwing some diagonals here and there. The closest I have seen in Europe is Barcelona.

1/

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Written by Marcos Dione on 2025-01-14 at 20:37

@alan @gedankenstuecke Look at this thing: 2300km+ and you have barely went further up from 300m ASL.

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Written by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras on 2025-01-14 at 20:49

@mdione @alan having spent a few days in San Martín de los Andes now, you can immediately notice on the map when the flat valley and with that the clear grid ends 😂 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/-40.15548/-71.34804

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Written by Alan Grant on 2025-01-14 at 21:07

@gedankenstuecke

Back in what now feels like another lifetime, I crossed quite a few of those 1000s of flat kilometres by bus. And I remember the novelty of La Plata with its diagonal (but still straight) lines.

In Chile, with generally less flat land than Argentina, quite a few cities feel like a fight between the grid system and the terrain - Valparaíso probably being the most dramatic example.

@mdione

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Written by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras on 2025-01-14 at 22:16

@alan @mdione I’ve started to cover some of those kilometres for Panoramax! https://panoramax.openstreetmap.fr/#background=streets&focus=map&map=3.82/-35.35/-64.19&speed=250

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Written by Marcos Dione on 2025-01-14 at 22:15

@alan @gedankenstuecke Chile is mountains and sea, with mostly only the Central Valley to speak of flat, and even then is way more upsy-downsy. Maybe between Talca and Los Ángeles...

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