Bike Lanes in Chattanooga

Jul 21, 2023 | Open Street Map, QGIS

I was sitting around thinking there other day that I’ve been doing OpenStreetMap “things” for way too long. With one volunteer job going dormant I decided to re-visit something I had worked on 12 years ago.

I had met up with some OSM folk here in town around 2010 and we did something weird and wild – we mapped “bike lanes” in town. I don’t think there were any at that point. Basically we wanted to know who was riding bikes where and we shoved that information into OpenStreetMap with the goal of doing a “tri-modal” application where you could walk, ride a bike, or ride a bus. We actually made something that went no where and that was that.

Probably out of that we had the makings of a “bike infrastructure”. Maybe there was a plan already in place but regardless we modified a lot of data in OSM with the “CHA:bicycle=designated” Key:Value. In 2023 Bike Lanes are exploding in town. I can’t really find a good map of the lanes. I know maps exists somewhere in the city but…..I don’t have it. Meanwhile I see more of this:

There is this map circa 2018:

So Far I have this:

This was done by a lot of walking/driving/some bike riding and existing data. I’m down now to going out and tracking down routes and connecting them because I know the lanes aren’t this disconnected. I also don’t completely believe the lanes I have. The ultimate goal is to have some sort of legitimate bike lane map in OSM so anyone can use it.

Once all this gets entered into OSM – I’m using QuickOSM and a query to pull it all down.

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