[Talk-us] End of an Era, data collection to slow in Oklahoma, project announcement

[Paul Johnson]

Alright, after nearly 110,000 miles, 4000 notes, 2000 trips, 2 years, and
an epic road trip from Portland, Oregon to Long Beach, California to Tulsa,
Oklahoma via Historic Route 66, I'm leaving my current position as a
leading field service engineer in Northeast Oklahoma to take a job as a
support engineer with a local internet hosting company.  What does this
mean?  My GPX uploads and creation of OSM notes is going to become more
sporadic, and someone in Oklahoma's going to have the opportunity to
out-edit me (maybe, I still have a massive backlog, plus ongoing projects
inspired by my current, coming-to-an-end job).  As a result, I'm also going
to be pulling back on watching out for and maintaining construction zones
outside the Tulsa City-County network and OklaDOT's Tulsa zone (I don't
think I have any mapped construction zones outside this area at this time).

I'm not leaving the OpenStreetMap project, though out of a want to continue
mapping and an understanding on how OSM in Oklahoma is used actively, I'm
going to become more project oriented (especially once I'm done inspecting
the vicinity of the traces I collected over the last two years).  Knowing
the limitations and challenges of every other major mapping provider in the
region in practice has left me with a unique perspective on how a map
should work, and I plan on continuing my efforts to help support travelers
and mobile professionals in the region until I, somehow, manage to find OSM
is Complete™ (yeah, don't count on that ever happening).  I'm just not
going to be actively monitoring, on average, 240 highway miles per day like
I have been.

I've yet to properly name my current project for OSM, which has recently
gotten underway and is going to take a LOT of time to complete assuming I
don't get help.  The basic jist of it is that I'm moving from county to
county, in order of 2010 population, to complete route relations for State
Highways, State Turnpikes, US Highways, and Interstate Highways in
Oklahoma, with a special emphasis on ensuring route relations, lane counts,
turn lanes, and placement=* tags are accurate relative to the most recent
Mapbox data (or personal recollection, whichever is more recent).

My ultimate goal is to make OpenStreetMap, far and away, the most useful
map for navigation in Oklahoma, something I already believe we've no doubt
achieved with apps like Osmand capable of inferring address lookups through
Nominatim as a supplement to the physically mapped data,
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