Flash back 12 or more years ago and I was siting with a new found group mapping Bike and Bus “things” into OpenStreetMap in Chattanooga. About the only thing I remember is we tagged designated lanes as “CHA:bicycle=designated”. It was a lot of fun and ultimately didn’t go anywhere.
Flash forward 12 years to now and I’ve moved away, moved back, and have been doing random OSM things in town when I get time. Of course I had a thought “how did the bike lanes look after 12 years”. The answer was “Basically the same” and we have a lot more bike lanes in 2023 vs 2011 that aren’t mapped.
So I went out this weekend to do some good old fashioned surveying. I took what few roads we had tagged out with Mergin Maps and started filling in what was missing. If I found a painted bike symbol or street sign the road was added back into OSM with all the tags I could add.
With a little bit of driving I was able to start connecting bike routes and adding new ones. This is going to take a while – BUT – at the end I should have a legit bike map of downtown. Next field outing will be on my bike.
One problem I hit was automating a download out of OSM. I was able to use Overpass Turbo and grab all the bike lanes. All the attributes were merged into one field and I could break out what I needed BUT – that was way more work than I wanted.
The QuickOSM plugin in QGIS separated out what I needed into a more traditional “gis” setup. QuickOSM:
My attribute table now:
Moving forward I’ll be using QuickOSM to get to the final product which will be a map to show you what lanes on a bicycle will get you flattened and which lanes won’t in Chattanooga.
