User-editable Road Maps Downloadable as Shapefiles

[Blake Michaleski]

Excellent work!

With today being the first day of hurricane season, are there any plans to set this up for the gulf coast and east coast sites? Obviously not as useful in hurricane chasing as in plains chasing but would love to finally integrate my navigation and radar into one program, obviously the GR products being the base program.

 

[Jim Hunt]

I would love to see KIND and KIWX done too.

 

[Scott Lincoln]

With today being the first day of hurricane season, are there any plans to set this up for the gulf coast and east coast sites?

At this time I have just planned to do sites in tornado alley. Although most of the tedious, annoying labor is done by ArcMap automatically over the course of like 4 hours, it still takes some time and labor on my part to download each of the zipped-up shapefiles and extract the files I want. I might try and automate this in the future when I can figure out how.

Because of that, I probably wont add any hurricane sites to my automatic queue at this time. Perhaps if I have some free time some day I might do some shapefiles for the Gulf Coast broken up into larger pieces than the radar-specific ones - but on a non-updated basis. If you want files for that area now (and have a computer that can handle big shapefiles), you can download state-wide shapefiles from the CloudMade site. They will work with the style file I created.

http://downloads.cloudmade.com/north_america/united_states/

 

[Scott Lincoln]

I would love to see KIND and KIWX done too.

I should be able to get you KIND for sure here pretty soon as I already download the road data for Indiana so that I can cover the Illinois sites. KIWX, I'm not sure about yet.

 

[Scott Lincoln]

Updated to add KIND, as per request.

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~slincoln/GRS/shapefiles/

 

[Scott Lincoln]

After a few more requests off of the GR forums, I decided it would be best if I tried to semi-automate the whole process of creating the shapefiles. This way I could keep them updated more easily with less work from me, and I could also add more sites. With that in mind, I decided to go all out, and doubled the number of available sites/shapefiles.

MAF, SJT, GRK, DYX, FWS, SHV, LZK, NQA, PAH, VWX, IWX, ILN, GRR, DTX, CYS, PUX, FDX, GGW, GRB, MKX, LOT were added.

I also added available shapefiles from Canada to the sites with ranges that extend beyond our northern boundary.

The coverage area is now basically the entire plains and midwest. The entire update process now takes about 6 hours, and is over 3GB in size.

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~slincoln/GRS/shapefiles/

Please let me know if there are any problems.

 

[Jim Hunt]

Thanks Scott for the work and adding Indiana.

So I am not seeing any road names. Is there a setting I have wrong?

 

[Scott Lincoln]

People have mentioned to me before about the road names. As far as I know there isn't much that can be done. I've set the style file to place the "name" field of the shapefiles in the status bar of GR. I have noticed that some roads seem to have this blank. I can double-check to make sure that none of the operations that I do in ArcGIS take away the road names, but I am pretty sure that it comes that way from the database.

Since it is a community supported and updated mapping database, the best I can say is that if you see important roads that are unlabeled, go in an edit them on openstreetmap.org using the "edit" tab. Make a new field down at the bottom, and type the name in. It should save automatically and after a few weeks when I do a new update, it will be available to everyone.

 

[Jim Hunt]

People have mentioned to me before about the road names. As far as I know there isn't much that can be done. I've set the style file to place the "name" field of the shapefiles in the status bar of GR. I have noticed that some roads seem to have this blank. I can double-check to make sure that none of the operations that I do in ArcGIS take away the road names, but I am pretty sure that it comes that way from the database.

Since it is a community supported and updated mapping database, the best I can say is that if you see important roads that are unlabeled, go in an edit them on openstreetmap.org using the "edit" tab. Make a new field down at the bottom, and type the name in. It should save automatically and after a few weeks when I do a new update, it will be available to everyone.

Doh! I was not looking there. Sorry.

 

[Scott Lincoln]

Just did a new update that fixes several little bugs reported here and on the GR product forums.

-Shapefiles from Lousiania will now show up on Shreveport NEXRAD
-Shapefiles from Ohio will now show up on Michigan sites
-Many files sizes have been reduced as I realized that my batch script is putting shapefiles into the zip files twice in some instances
-Shapefiles now on par with the June 3rd, 2009 CloudMade update

 

[Danny Neal]

The requested URL /~slincoln/GRS/shapefiles/LOT_OpenStreetMap_Roads.zip was not found on this server.

I tried LOT and got this message just an FYI..... Appreciate all your hard work Scott.

 

[Scott Lincoln]

The requested URL /~slincoln/GRS/shapefiles/LOT_OpenStreetMap_Roads.zip was not found on this server.

I tried LOT and got this message just an FYI..... Appreciate all your hard work Scott.

Should be fixed now.