Santa Cruz County, California
 Santa Cruz, California
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| Latitude : 37, Longitude : -122 |
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Santa Cruz is a county in California at latitude 37, longitude -122.
Contents |
Events
Nothing planned.
Who's up for organizing another mapping party?
Please feel free to suggest locations and goals for future events. A UCSC Mapping Party is a "next" good choice, as OSM needs added and improved several colleges and many footpaths as well as amenities like parking lots and bicycle parking. A good meeting place is the restaurant across from the Baytree Bookstore at Quarry Plaza, as it is centrally-located, and serves both pizza and beer!
Past events
Santa_Cruz_Mapping_Party_May2009 downtown
Imports
Parks
- user:Apo42 uploaded many of the open space and all California state parks (from UC Davis-sourced CaSIL data) including those in Santa Cruz County. The vast remainder of the parks in the county (county, city and private) came from the SCCGIS import. A small number of minor, usually city parks, e.g. La Barranca and Mimi De Marta were added manually from non-SCCGIS sources.
Landuse
- user:srmixter has imported official landuse zones from the Santa Cruz County GIS (SCCGIS) site.
The purpose of the SCCGIS import was to add the official zones for residential, industrial, commercial, farms and forests. The import included (multi)polygons with tags of landuse=public_facility and landuse=special_use, which do not render. These are currently being improved as the import is complete. As they don't show up/render in OSM, we are adding supplemental tags to them (keeping the original tags) based on observation to something that is recognized/rendered in OSM. Thus, we both keep the original data, as well as don't stray too far in the direction of "coding for the renderers."
Imports are complete for Santa Cruz County. Thanks for your patience. I thought there should have been more zones loaded, but I checked with the shapefile, and it looks like they are all there. Unfortunately I had some problems with the script crashing so there may be some repeated areas and extra nodes. I'll go ahead and continue cleaning them up. Validator in JOSM usually does a good job of deleting the empty nodes. Feel free to adjust any of the layers so they better match the Yahoo imagery or are not overlapping. The import had two tags for landuse: public_facility and and special_use. These are obviously not rendered in OSM. So if you know a better use, feel free to add them. We prefer to keep these areas in OSM if possible. The project is all about the data not necessarily the rendering. I still have a lot of work to do to clean up the imports. Thanks again for your help and patience. nmixter
There are still multiple-polygon upload remnants from this. Validator may report extra points to delete. We had hoped to establish a tag called something like "upload_version" (monotonically increasing integers) but we didn't do so. A (multi)polygon WITH "Zoning=" (upload_version=2) is later than an otherwise-identical one without this tag (upload_version=1) . Work to clean this up continues on both the part of user:srmixter and user:stevea.
user:stevea has begun to take a more render-positive, yet still accurate approach to the "landuse=special_use" areas from srmixter's import, which don't render: as Santa Cruz County is largely (over 2/3) wooded with redwood and mixed conifer/deciduous, areas which are special_use but are also completely or largely wooded (as viewed by Yahoo aerial photography) are now additionally tagged "natural=wood." This allows them to accurately render where they otherwise wouldn't, as this rendering is based not on a landuse tag but a natural tag. Some of these special_use areas have a minor amount of meadow instead of wood, and so these are still wholly tagged as "natural=wood" but also have scattered "landuse=meadow" areas sprinkled over them where accurate. Technically this is a "double-overlap" of landuse ("special_use," which is meaningful only from the "official" County-data upload, and "meadow," where appropriate), but as "special_use" doesn't render, wood is a natural tag, and meadow superimposes over wood, the effect is both accurate and visually rather pleasing. In some cases small details like buildings, man_made features (water_tower, etc.) and tracks/paths are also included on these "special_use" parcels. This is in keeping with the consensus that has emerged of "capturing zoning with landuse tags is a good first step to avoid large blank areas, but actual on-the-ground data are preferred to simple zoning (landuse only) tags when on-the-ground data are also known." In other words, the active Santa Cruz County uploaders and editors know that having most or all of the County zoned with landuse tags from official data is a (renders pleasingly) good first step, but only just that. There is much more editing to do which, over time, will additionally improve these data with better accuracy and more details of what is actually "on the ground."
To be clear about landuse in the contiguous county: land and water landuse data areas defined "inside" of city limit boundaries (cities of Santa Cruz, Capitola, Scotts Valley, Watsonville) derive from sources other than SCCGIS. These data are public and/or experiential.
Streams
- user:DanHomerick imported the Stream.shp layer of the Hydrography dataset from the Santa Cruz GIS site in October 2009. He used the Java program shp-to-osm-0.6.1 to convert the data from Shapefile format to OSM format and bulk_upload.py to upload it. Since, at the time of the import, shp-to-osm does not connect line segments he used the validator plugin in JOSM to merge overlapping nodes. This connected many stream segments correctly, but left some unconnected at the time of the import. Existing rivers were not programatically deleted, instead preferring to rely on manual verification before their deletion. Many of the imported streams were initially pointing the wrong direction (a way with a stream/river tag should point downstream). Work is underway to correct known issues with the import (Oct. 2009), and is mostly complete as of Feb. 2010. One note about the tags used: many of the streams were listed as type "swale" (a low lying area) in the original dataset. These were translated as "waterway=stream" + "intermittent=yes" + "note=swale" tags for the upload, but in many cases, especially near the mouth of a stream, a swale may not actually have intermittent flow. At the moment, the intermittent tag does not affect the Mapnik rendering, but the tag should still be deleted in cases where it is inaccurate.
County Boundary
- user:Apo42 uploaded CaSIL-based county-boundary data for all of California, including Santa Cruz County in early 2010. The Santa Cruz County boundary was harmonized by user:stevea. In particular, the southern boundary wandered a bit due to the flooding and re-coursing of the Pajaro River, the eastern boundary is close to, but not quite extant with the SCCGIS zoning (parcels) upload, especially around Mt. Madonna Park, the northern boundary was checked to harmonize with stream data uploaded by user:DanHomerick (noted above) and user:mk408's stream data upload from Santa Clara Valley Water District around the "spine" of the Santa Cruz Mountains (the county boundary), and the northwest and western boundaries were checked against both CaSIL state park and SCCGIS uploads, still not quite with perfect alignment.
Local Conventions
We have begun a convention with parks: starting with user:Apo42's tagging of State Park data that included a tag "park:type=state_park." In Santa Cruz County we extend this to include the tags "park:type=county_park" and "park:type=city_park" for parks with management/jurisdiction at those admin_levels (indeed, this feature may be combined with admin_level at some point) and "park:type=private_park" to private parks areas (for example, a small decathlon-event park with access=private), private campgrounds and for-fee short-term trailer parks. The point is not to make these render (yet) but such tags can be useful in a search/find, over a large area, for example. A proposal to combine these tags with the boundary= tag so that these render with different color dashing is being developed. Today, the "boundary=national_park" tag renders with a green-dashed boundary. In the future, rendering may be extended to display parks tagged with state_park, county_park, city_park and private_park using different colors of dashing.
Work to be done in the County
Many TIGER-sourced "residential" roads in rural, unincorporated Santa Cruz County are known to be wrong by tens or even hundreds of meters. Some are even highway=track instead of highway=residential. As some of these roads are public, but some are access=private (it is not always clear which), it would be very helpful for somebody with local knowledge of these rural roads to bike or drive around gathering GPS tracks, and upload these as better-aligned (and better-named?) roads already extant in OSM. This is more true in the heavily-wooded and hilly/mountainous areas of central and northern County, and less true in the flat, primarily agricultural areas of southern County.
In May 2010, an OSM user edited the coastal area and substantially changed many existing park uploads and coastline data, not necessarily for the better. Multipolygon relations were constructed with members out of order, and though many of these have been corrected, there remains certain review yet to do, especially with the coastline (from about Wilder Ranch State Beach south and east to approximately Opal Cliffs). Because of the very slow mapnik coastline rendering process making interactive editing difficult, it may be some time (months) before all of the coastline corrections are completed. Update later August 2010: an initial rendering in Mapnik and Osmarender is mostly pleasing, though not every possible error that might have been introduced in these areas can be said to be fully corrected. JOSM analysis continues. Near-final update September 2010: problem is believed to be solved (out-of-order and missing-outer-tag elements in County boundary relation is repaired from bad Potlach edit). Final, Q4-2010: it appears we have a normal/stable coastline, at least south of Wilder Ranch. Early 2011: However, north of Wilder Ranch to Pelican/Greyhound Rocks and inland to Blodgetts Road, Osmarender remains blocky and not fully rendered at medium zoom levels (12 and below). It is not known if this is an error in the data that remain from these bad Potlatch edits, other bad edits or bad data, or persistently slow or buggy Osmarender rendering. Mid 2011: the Osmarender rendering north of Wilder seems to have stabilized at medium and wider zoom levels.
In December 2010, a suggestion was proposed to the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission to introduce a local cycleway network (lcn) numbering system (colloquially known as "CycleNet" or "SZCycleNet" in a statewide context). While this is still in its introductory stages and is being brought before the City jurisdictions in the county for discussion and approval, two initial routes (Walnut-Soquel, which might become lcn or rcn 8, and Freedom Blvd., which might become lcn or rcn 80) have been introduced to OSM as proposed rcn bicycle route relations. Additionally, over 100 other lcn route relations (with state=proposed tag) have also been introduced, with tags "network=lcn" and "route=mtb" (the latter only for mountain bike routes suffixed with "M" in their ref tag). Thusly, OSM is becoming a venue for geographic communication/visualization of lcn/rcn/mtb bicycle route discussions and public introductions. A set of tags so that mountain bike routes render as both the dark green line (in Cycle Map) shown from route=mtb, as well as giving them numbers in the (shared with lcn) local address space have been determined, thanks to research via renderers Cycle Map, cycling.lonvia.de and mtb.lonvia.de. As jurisdictions and the county reach consensus on these proposed routes, the "state=proposed" tag should/shall be removed as they become legally sanctioned. Signage on these routes will follow their state going from proposed to legally sanctioned, so cyclists should not expect physical bicycle signage on these routes for some time, 2014 at the earliest. (An exception is Pacific Coast Bike Route, proposed ncn=95, which is "lightly signed"). To be clear, the routes are all on legally-sanctioned bicycle infrastructure, CycleNet is simply "these" routing numbers proposed as a local network numbering.
Certain "holes" in the county (zoning) or OSM landuse uploads remain as "special_use" parcels: effectively the SCCGIS department "punted" on defining what landuse these parcels actually have such that "special_use" as a landuse tag means "unspecified." As described above, well-defined mostly- or all-wooded parcels also have "natural=wood" defined upon them (with meadows and buildings superimposed) but the large remaining special_use parcels do not lend themselves to this without a lot of tedious work. A later (more recent, perhaps post-2012 or 2013) upload from SCCGIS may improve this. Otherwise, these large special_use parcels may remain mostly undefined without substantial editing contributions.
City of Santa Cruz
Work continues (2012 onwards) in the City of Santa Cruz to add the following:
more complete amenity=parking areas in commercial and industrial zones, where appropriate,
incline=steep on highways where appropriate (primarily for Cycle Map, though likely to be helpful for disabled/wheelchair access routing), many more areas which are actually well-served for wheelchairs (highway=elevator, power/automated doors, ramps, curb cuts, disabled parking...) are not marked as such nor mapped with these access routes in mind where they certainly exist,
highway=bus_stop, and bus routing in general on the excellent local transit system, especially as we prepare for the impending public purchase of the local branch rail line,
address numbering at landmark buildings and block level starting Downtown (a major tourism attraction, popular with locals too!),
completion of UCSC campus (specifically, Colleges Crown, Merrill, Kresge, Nine and Ten remain to be done, and parking, footpaths and bicycle amenities remain incomplete),
(Permission has been generously granted by UCSC to use NAMES, but NOT GRAPHICS from maps published at http://maps.ucsc.edu. So, no copying of graphics, but names from those maps may be used to identify buildings, parking lots, etc. that YOU draw. Roads now appear to be correct, but parking_aisles and amenity=parking are now a frontier, as are bicycle_parking, remaining footpaths and much else),
places of worship (largely done, some details remain to be done, such as sport courts visible in aerial views, adjunct buildings and amenity=parking),
remaining post_boxes and traffic_calming around the City.
City of Capitola
Zoning/landuse areas are good to very good, but minor improvements can still be made. A zoning map is found at http://www.ci.capitola.ca.us/capcity.nsf/vLookup/Zoning24x18/$file/Zoning24x18.pdf
Some commercial zone wheelchair access has already begun to be added.
City of Scotts Valley
user:DanHomerick is a frequent contributor. There is an official zoning map available (http://www.scottsvalley.org/downloads/planning/ZoningMap.pdf) but it does not always agree with "on the ground" reality. OSM prefers reality over zoning. As noted above, while zoning is a good first step, reality is best.
City of Watsonville
Many contributions have been made, but OSM needs more volunteers to improve the map in Watsonville!
See Also
- BBBike @ Santa Cruz - a cycle route planner for Santa Cruz
Contributors in the county
- user:stevea has done a thorough job of mapping Santa Cruz, and continues to refine and edit throughout the county, especially the 2009 official SCCGIS and 2010 CaSIL uploads.
- user:srmixter has done numerous zones both manually and with the shp2osm script.
- user:Apo42 has added official state parks and open spaces to the county, in addition to CaSIL-based county boundaries.
- user:DanHomerick has added areas in the central and northern portion of the county.
- user:adelman has edited in the central and southern portion of the county, especially improving mountain bike trails.
- user:StellanL is less active locally now, but has made many local contributions in the past, and is active in the Greater SF Bay Area.
- user:balrog-kun, user:yellowbkpk, and especially user:DaveHansen have all made important contributions in the "early days."
