Bike Lanes in Chattanooga

Jul 21, 2023 | GIS, 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.

You may also like

Watershed Geo Part 2

Watershed Geo Part 2

Part 1 This is part 2 which will be pretty simple. This is more of the "get organized" part. In part 1 I was able to generate a watershed boundary from LIDAR Elevation Data. After it was generated I went back and checked the watershed line and really only found one...

Geoserver Rabbit Holes

Geoserver Rabbit Holes

TL/DR - Funding is Hard. Last week I ran down a rabbit hole. While I'm passable as a sysadmin - my skills are lacking in some areas. I had a conversation with someone on hardware and software and we ended on "How would you run this 911 stack of software if you had the...

QGIS and LIDAR

So this will be my last "New Class" announcement for a bit. Back in the spring of 2024, I taught a 4 hour QGIS and LIDAR class at the TNGIC meeting (State of TN GIS meeting). I ran through it and shelved it and now I'm fixing the problem spots and smoothing down the...