The splash page showing a GIS image of San Francisco is always a sign that the lights are on and nobody is home.
On one hand people feel compelled to put up images of San Francisco to make people think that they're with it. On the other hand if you've been to San Francisco you'll know it is where GIS applications go to die. It's where I'll walk past endless open restaurants because my coworker insists on finding one with Yelp and five of the restaurants listed on Yelp won't close. It's where the only place my handheld GPS can get a fix is on the roof of the Moscone Center. It's where my handheld GPS struggles to route, even for a car, because there is just too much geometry in too small of an area.
Go to some normal city, say St. Louis, MO or Billings, MT and you will see GIS applications "just work" in comparison.
I've done GNSS localization in SF and I can't relate to what you're saying here. It's not notably more challenging than any other dense urban environment and the public commercial maps (e.g. Google, Apple) have better data than they do in most cities. I saw more issues with Pittsburgh and Phoenix because they hit weird edge cases no one had foreseen than SF, which had the typical issues you expect to see in urban canyons. Plus, there are local GNSS companies testing in the bay area, so stuff tends to just work out of the box.
I think this is why Google preferentially wanted to take me down a 45 MPH state route that runs downhill and has curves and no separation between the bike lane and vehicle traffic instead of the nice, calm, traffic-less series of roads in residential neighborhoods that was accessible with a quarter-mile detour. Those roads didn't have sidewalks or bike lanes marked on the roads, so they were totally unsafe for a cyclist. As opposed to the 45 MPH road, which is perfectly safe because it has a bike lane.
In my city the bike lanes are almost all death traps because they only exist to rake in federal funding with no care for making them useful or safe. I avoid them whenever possible. They routed one "lane" onto a narrow sidewalk under a wide railroad bridge and had to change a city ordinance prohibiting bikes on sidewalks in that region of the city.
This is one area where autonomous vehicle companies can and should be contributing more to the public sphere. Much of this data already exists at a very high quality within mapping datasets to adjust priors for unseen pedestrian risk.
There simply aren't institutional mechanisms to make mapping data public though.
For biking and walking, could accepting data from Strava users (or other places that let you download GPS tracks), let you infer where there are sidewalks and good bike routes?
Eg if you have 20 GPS traces in an area and they all turn at one point, that’s a good place to turn. Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?
I refer to Strava and RideWithGPS heatmaps whenever planning a new cycling or running route, and they are very useful, but they still need vetting (satellite and street view mostly) since 1) people have different tolerances for safe/comfortable interactions with traffic, and 2) road race data is often mixed in (despite users being able to tag races), which frequently are on (closed) roads you wouldn’t want to be on otherwise.
> Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?
There's still a quality difference between a well-worn path and sidewalk. It can be a great way to find places to build new sidewalks. (There's the classic story of the University that didn't pave sidewalks in its quad until well worn paths in the grass were visible, using essentially crowd judgement/"ant hill optimization".)
Mapbox presumably does this now. The issue with the real world is that you do need some high quality truth data to do any decent routing. Different users/vehicles are more or less sensitive to road conditions. If you want to provide an effective micro-mobility routing solution you have to know with certainty where the sidewalks and bike lanes are, how wide they are, how f'ed-up they are and provide directions accordingly. Waiting until 10,000 different transportation agencies decide to fix sidewalks and bike lanes on different schedules and different standards isn't gonna solve issues any time soon.
If you’re editing Openstreetmap, using data from Street View is prohibited by the license, even if you pay for it I believe. However, Microsoft has licensed Bing Streetside for this use for free; the dataset isn’t as good as Street View, but is much better than Mapillary.
I think this is a trend for the future. Mico-knowledge (tm) like this will enable things we haven't thought of. Things like this 'fill in the gaps' that make it hard to create new services and take advantage of opportunities. I hope this continues to be followed up on.
The splash page showing a GIS image of San Francisco is always a sign that the lights are on and nobody is home.
On one hand people feel compelled to put up images of San Francisco to make people think that they're with it. On the other hand if you've been to San Francisco you'll know it is where GIS applications go to die. It's where I'll walk past endless open restaurants because my coworker insists on finding one with Yelp and five of the restaurants listed on Yelp won't close. It's where the only place my handheld GPS can get a fix is on the roof of the Moscone Center. It's where my handheld GPS struggles to route, even for a car, because there is just too much geometry in too small of an area.
Go to some normal city, say St. Louis, MO or Billings, MT and you will see GIS applications "just work" in comparison.
I've done GNSS localization in SF and I can't relate to what you're saying here. It's not notably more challenging than any other dense urban environment and the public commercial maps (e.g. Google, Apple) have better data than they do in most cities. I saw more issues with Pittsburgh and Phoenix because they hit weird edge cases no one had foreseen than SF, which had the typical issues you expect to see in urban canyons. Plus, there are local GNSS companies testing in the bay area, so stuff tends to just work out of the box.
I think this is why Google preferentially wanted to take me down a 45 MPH state route that runs downhill and has curves and no separation between the bike lane and vehicle traffic instead of the nice, calm, traffic-less series of roads in residential neighborhoods that was accessible with a quarter-mile detour. Those roads didn't have sidewalks or bike lanes marked on the roads, so they were totally unsafe for a cyclist. As opposed to the 45 MPH road, which is perfectly safe because it has a bike lane.
This is a great project.
In my city the bike lanes are almost all death traps because they only exist to rake in federal funding with no care for making them useful or safe. I avoid them whenever possible. They routed one "lane" onto a narrow sidewalk under a wide railroad bridge and had to change a city ordinance prohibiting bikes on sidewalks in that region of the city.
This is one area where autonomous vehicle companies can and should be contributing more to the public sphere. Much of this data already exists at a very high quality within mapping datasets to adjust priors for unseen pedestrian risk.
There simply aren't institutional mechanisms to make mapping data public though.
Are there that many (or even any) autonomous vehicles designed to drive on bike paths and/or sidewalks exclusively ?
For biking and walking, could accepting data from Strava users (or other places that let you download GPS tracks), let you infer where there are sidewalks and good bike routes?
Eg if you have 20 GPS traces in an area and they all turn at one point, that’s a good place to turn. Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?
I refer to Strava and RideWithGPS heatmaps whenever planning a new cycling or running route, and they are very useful, but they still need vetting (satellite and street view mostly) since 1) people have different tolerances for safe/comfortable interactions with traffic, and 2) road race data is often mixed in (despite users being able to tag races), which frequently are on (closed) roads you wouldn’t want to be on otherwise.
> Or you can assume something has a sidewalk if many people have walked there?
There's still a quality difference between a well-worn path and sidewalk. It can be a great way to find places to build new sidewalks. (There's the classic story of the University that didn't pave sidewalks in its quad until well worn paths in the grass were visible, using essentially crowd judgement/"ant hill optimization".)
Mapbox presumably does this now. The issue with the real world is that you do need some high quality truth data to do any decent routing. Different users/vehicles are more or less sensitive to road conditions. If you want to provide an effective micro-mobility routing solution you have to know with certainty where the sidewalks and bike lanes are, how wide they are, how f'ed-up they are and provide directions accordingly. Waiting until 10,000 different transportation agencies decide to fix sidewalks and bike lanes on different schedules and different standards isn't gonna solve issues any time soon.
I hope to use street view and Mapillary data to see if I can improve this myself, actually, but street view is too expensive and Mapillary too sparse
If you’re editing Openstreetmap, using data from Street View is prohibited by the license, even if you pay for it I believe. However, Microsoft has licensed Bing Streetside for this use for free; the dataset isn’t as good as Street View, but is much better than Mapillary.
Thanks for that (I haven't tried streetside) - I'm not editing openstreetmap at this point but trying to find homes near decent infra.
I think this is a trend for the future. Mico-knowledge (tm) like this will enable things we haven't thought of. Things like this 'fill in the gaps' that make it hard to create new services and take advantage of opportunities. I hope this continues to be followed up on.
I do not understand the mentality of blogging sites that do this, why lose visitors over simple text display?
"Your Browser Is No Longer Supported"
"To view this website and enjoy a better online experience, update your browser for free."
Yup, I used Wix. It's the best I can do with the resources we have.
It appears to be made with Wix.com website builder.
https://support.wix.com/en/article/supported-browsers
Out of curiosity, what browser are you using?