[Imports] street imports for Portland, Oregon, U.S.

[Steve Singer]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2011, PJ Houser wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> In Portland, Oregon, the region's transit agency Trimet (http://www.trimet.org) is
> transitioning to an open-source trip planner (http://maps5.trimet.org/otp/). The trip planner
> will use OSM data for a multi-modal approach - walking, biking, driving - and Trimet's route
> data. However, Portland data is not accurate enough nor complete enough yet in OpenStreetMap,
> so my job is to help fix that with Trimet and the community. The roads are often incorrect or
> do not intersect properly, making consistently good routing impossible. Bike routes and
> off-road trails are seriously lacking.
> 
> Recently, local datasets (http://www.civicapps.org/) have been made public domain, and Trimet
> would like to update Multnomah County and Clark County's streets using Metro's (the regional
> agency) data. I'd love your input. We have a shapefile of all the streets along with basic
> attributes, sufficient for routing. I've started learning about bulk imports, but I don't want
> to overwrite the community's input, particularly special tags or attributes that Metro's data
> does not contain (like surface).
> 
> Questions:
> 1) How do you feel about some kind of automatic editing or (selective) import? Other methods?
> 2) How do I go about doing that? (I heard of something called RoadMatcher)?

RoadMatcher is a plugin for the OpenJump GIS system (www.openjump.org) that 
was designed to take 2 datasets containing road networks and identify which 
roads in each really represent the same road.

I used Road Matcher for the GeoBase imports for Ontario and Alberta in 
Canada.  I found RoadMatcher was very good in telling me if a road in the 
Geobase data was not already in openstreetmap.   It did much worse trying to 
match up existing openstreetmap roads with the geobase versions.  The 
Geobase data was broken down to having a line segment between each 
intersection.  Openstreetmap ways often spam many intersections and thus 
would cover many road segments.  RoadMatcher seemed to have a harder time 
dealing with this.

You might have some luck using roadmatcher to identify the really bad roads 
in OSM that you can then manually go in and adjust but putting both 
roadnetworks as layers in JOSM but turn out to be just as effective.








> 3) Any other input?
> 
> I also posed these questions to the talk-us list.
> 
> And for fair warning, I will soon be writing you all about importing bike routes (as relations)
> and off-road trails. Both bike routes and off-road trails are lacking in the Portland area and
> there seems to be less risk of erasing users' work (as there isn't too much yet).
> 
> Thank you for any help or input you can provide.
> --
> PJ Houser
> Trimet, GIS
> houserp at trimet.org
> 
>