Santa Clara County, California

V・T・E Santa Clara County, California

latitude: 37.33, longitude: -121.94

Browse map of Santa Clara County 37°19′48.00″ N, 121°56′24.00″ W

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Users in Santa Clara County GPS traces Geohack for OSM with more maps

External links: Notes Quality checks with Osmose Keep Right! OSM Inspector Streets without names CheckAutopista2 Public transport with öpnvkarte.de Wikipedia: en Wikimedia Commons OpenStreetMap contributors map Mapillary KartaView

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Santa Clara County is a county in California at latitude 37°19′48.00″ North, longitude 121°56′24.00″ West. <slippymap h=480 w=720 z=11 lat=37.35 lon=-121.98></slippymap>

Santa Clara County is located at the southern end of California's San Francisco Bay Area. The county's urbanized area is known locally as the South Bay or Santa Clara Valley. It includes the cities of Campbell, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Milpitas, Monte Sereno, Morgan Hill, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale. The South Bay is known around the world as "Silicon Valley" due to its high concentration of silicon chip-making, software and high-technology companies headquartered in the area.

State of the Map

OpenStreetMap's coverage of Santa Clara County has been improving for over ten years, yet remains a work in progress. The North County cities are exceptionally well-mapped in terms of infrastructure, addresses, and businesses. San Jose and West Valley have only minimal coverage of buildings and businesses and very few addresses. Cycling infrastructure is well-mapped, but many local and regional route=bicycle relations need completion with this infrastructure as member elements. The public bus transportation network (especially bus stops) is not especially well-mapped though rail infrastructure and passenger rail transportation might be called a rough-and-ready version 1.

San Jose ranks among the ten largest cities in the United States by population, yet San Jose's mapper community is smaller than those of other large cities, and its OSM coverage has a lot of room to grow. We need your help! Whether you prefer field surveying, armchair mapping, or finding freely-licensed data to import, you can help us build the best map of San Jose.

Resources

The default aerial imagery layers in iD and Potlatch are of high resolution but date back several years, so check the vintage of an OSM feature before remapping it based on aerial imagery.

As of July 2017, the "DigitalGlobe Premium Imagery" layer is the freshest; however, it is quite severely offset. The "Mapbox Satellite" layer is slightly older but is better aligned. The "Bing aerial imagery" layer is several years outdated but very clear and well aligned. In general, you should trace over Bing or Mapbox imagery as a first pass, then double-check with DigitalGlobe to spot anything that needs to be updated.

Mapillary has thorough coverage of Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and North and West San Jose. Elsewhere, it is largely limited to freeways, expressways, and some major arterial streets. OpenStreetCam has good coverage of Mountain View and better coverage than Mapillary of major arterial streets in other parts of the county.

The South Bay has several ethnic enclaves in which business names are posted exclusively in a language other than English. If you have difficulty reading the sign, upload a photo of it to Mapillary or OpenStreetCam for another mapper to enter into OSM. Alternatively, you can try to do it yourself by running the photo through optical character recognition, such as the OCR function built into the Google Translate application on Android and iOS. (Use only the OCR text, not the translation or transliteration.)

Works by county government agencies are in the public domain, per County of Santa Clara v. California First Amendment Coalition. County agencies such as VTA may have useful resources to aid in mapping. However, please observe the import guidelines before systematically entering external data.

Community

Local user group
OSM South Bay
Meetings
When:	monthly on Thursday nights
Where:	Downtown San José (map)
Mailing list
mailing list – archive
Website
Code for San Jose
Image

We held our first mapping party in Mountain View in Feburary 2009. Since 2015, Maptime Silicon Valley has organized annual map-related meetups at Stanford University. In 2017, Code for San Jose (the local chapter of Code for America) began organizing South Bay mapping parties to help foster a local face-to-face community. [1]

Find non-wiki-using mappers using Who's around me? Be sure to subscribe to the talk-us mailing list, where the broader U.S. mapping community discusses tagging, imports, policy, evangelization, and more. There's also a lower-volume talk-us-sfbay mailing list for more local discussion. If you have any questions, you can also ask on the U.S. community's Slack channels, including the #sfbay channel, where you might encounter a South Bay mapper happy to help.

Please introduce your friends to OpenStreetMap! Reach out to enthusiast communities in orienteering, urban planning, and open source. Show a local trivia buff the old_name=* tag; show a cycling enthusiast the cycling routes page.

Here are some articles community members have written about their experiences mapping in the South Bay:

• OpenStreetMap knows the way to San Jose (June 5, 2006)
• A complete map (August 24, 2015)
• Civic Tech Volunteerism & OpenStreetMap: Reflections on Code for San Jose’s National Day of Civic Hacking 2017 (October 10, 2017)

Conference presentations:

• Do you node the way to San Jose? (State Of The Map U.S. 2017)

Monthly OSM meetup minutes:

• October 12, 2017

Transportation

Expressways

Santa Clara County has roadways rather unique in California known as "Expressways." Their history is curious: local citizens chartered them during the middle-20th century to be a three-phase tax approach to build freeways (highway=motorway). However, voters approved taxes for only the first two phases, leaving incomplete the final upgrade phase to freeway scheduled for the late-20th century. Expressways are usually dual-carriageway, moderate-to-higher speed roads (40-50 MPH / 65-80 kph) with traffic signals separated by relatively long distances. They are designed to minimize cross-traffic (few side-streets and driveways), have on-ramps, off-ramps, grade separated overpasses and underpasses in places, though mostly use highway=traffic_signals to regulate/route traffic, and so are denoted in OSM with highway=trunk. Only one has become a true freeway in California's legal sense (Guadalupe Parkway was upgraded to State Route 87). Different from freeways (which get a simple State Route number in their ref=* tag), expressways are part of California's County Route system and get a ref=* tag beginning with one of nine region-based capital letters followed by a one- or two-digit number, e.g. "G6" or "G21." Whether by bicycle or automobile, Expressways are aptly named, as they are often the fastest way to travel the traffic-congested roadways of Silicon Valley: many contain dedicated cycleway=lanes and "dynamic diamond lanes" with special overhead signals for high-occupancy vehicles (2 or more passengers) that change with daily commute patterns to keep traffic flowing.

Cycle routes

Main article: /Cycling routes

Public transportation

The county's public transportation networks vary in OSM coverage. International, national, regional, commuter, subway and light rail have good coverage, though most route=trains need upgrades to public transport version 2 to ensure software compatibility. Coverage of VTA's route=buses is poor and highway=bus_stops even poorer, though there have been efforts to import some VTA data. Each of the following pages catalogs either public transportation routes in OSM or an effort to improve or import into OSM public transportation data which serve Santa Clara County:

• Altamont Corridor Express (commuter rail)
• Amtrak (international and national rail)
• Amtrak California (regional rail)
• Bay Area Rapid Transit / BART (commuter rail / subway)
• Caltrain (commuter rail)
• Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority / VTA (local, regional, rapid bus service)
  • VTA Light Rail (light rail)

The VTA Trip Planner is powered by OpenStreetMap cycling infrastructure data.

To do

• Refine the San José city limits based on county planning department data. [2][3][4]
• Add remaining sidewalks and crosswalks following the San José sidewalk import.
• Complete Santa Clara Valley coverage assessment.
• Break up landuse=* areas into smaller, logical, named areas. For example, use landuse=residential for individual residential subdivisions, landuse=retail for retail complexes like strip malls, and landuse=commercial for office parks.
• Add maxspeed=* [5], maxspeed:advisory=*, maxheight=*, and maxweight=*.
• Add lanes=* tags to major thoroughfares. [6]
• Replace note:lanes=left lane is hov [7] and note:lanes=right lane is hov [8] with the appropriate hov:lanes=* tag.
• Add destination=* and destination:ref=* to link ways (freeway on-ramps and off-ramps alike) (see Exit Info).
• Add more San Jose neighborhoods as place=suburb or place=neighbourhood POIs.
• Micromap school grounds.
• Add crosswalks, especially at signalized intersections, which may require moving highway=traffic_signals points from the stop line to the middle of the intersection.
• Replace disconnected highway=stopline ways added by pflier with road_marking=solid_stop_line nodes on the associated ways.
• Add ramp meters as highway=traffic_signals traffic_signals=ramp_meter.
• Tag name:pronunciation=* for difficult names like "Almaden", "Los Gatos", and "Milpitas".
• Code for San Jose wishlist

See also

• BBBike @ Palo Alto - a cycle route planner for Palo Alto
• BBBike @ San José - a cycle route planner for San José