Cincinnati, Ohio

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Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Wikidata

latitude: 39.1, longitude: -84.516667
Browse map of Cincinnati 39°06′00.00″ N, 84°31′00.00″ W
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Cincinnati
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Cincinnati is a city in Ohio, United States at latitude 39°06′00.00″ North, longitude 84°31′00.00″ West.

Getting started

The Tri-State area has pretty good OSM coverage for an American metropolitan area, with extensive building footprints, transit routes, named landuse areas, footpaths and staircases, cul-de-sacs, and the beginnings of 3D building support (example). Virtually all roads imported from TIGER have been redrawn.

That said, there are infinite opportunities for improvement! Greater Cincinnati has seen a lot of activity over the past few years, but Northern Kentucky is quickly improving and we're starting to pay some attention to Southeast Indiana too. We may have a lot of buildings mapped, but hardly any have addresses on them. A great way to start is to zoom all the way into your neighborhood and add as much detail as you can. Even toolsheds are fair game.

See Ohio (and to a lesser extent Kentucky and Indiana) for relevant information on contributing to OpenStreetMap's coverage of Cincinnati.

We're also mapping Cincinnati's history to the same level of detail in OSM's sister project, OpenHistoricalMap.

Resources

Use this comparison table to choose the right aerial imagery layer to use when mapping.

Bing Streetside has extensive omnidirectional street-level imagery of Cincinnati; Butler, Clermont, Warren, and Kenton counties; and major streets in Hamilton and Campbell counties. As of 2022, much of this imagery dates to 2022, but some older imagery from 2012–2014 may still be accessible. Mapillary covers the Tri-State's highways, downtown and uptown Cincinnati, and major streets in the Loveland and Milford areas, mostly from 2018 onward. OpenStreetCam also has recent coverage of the Tri-State along the Interstates.

The Cincinnati Department of Public Services also publishes GPS data of their vehicles, which could be used to align aerial imagery.

The Lane Library hosts Ohio Historic Inventory forms for Butler County structures on the National Register of Historic Places. These forms are good sources of information like names, basements, and building materials. Many date to before 1989 and lack copyright notices, which mean they're in the public domain.

Imports

There is an ongoing import of CAGIS building footprints in Hamilton County. See Ohio/Imports for potential sources of data to import.

Tagging

Yellow island lights (or "turtle lamps") found at many pedestrian traffic islands (or "pork chop islands"): 

highway=street_lamp
support=pole
lamp_mount=straight_mast
light:method=electric
light:colour=yellow
light:count=1
light:lit=dusk-dawn
light:shape=cylindrical
light:tilt=-90
lamp_model=turtle
lamp_type=electric
luminous=yes
model:wikidata=Q111661470

Local Historic Landmarks designated by Cincinnati City Council: 

historic=heritage
heritage=8
heritage:operator=Cincinnati City Council
heritage:operator:wikidata=Q108758758
heritage:ref=*
heritage:since=*

Official Cincinnati neighborhood council boundaries are mapped as admin_level=10 boundary relations. Where two neighborhood councils disagree on a neighborhood boundary, the City of Cincinnati generally declines to adjudicate the dispute and instead gives the two councils concurrent jurisdiction over the overlapping territory. Thus, the neighborhood boundary relations overlap in OpenStreetMap as well. In lieu of a more established tagging scheme for subnational disputed boundaries, the disputed neighborhood boundaries are mapped as ways tagged: 

boundary=disputed
admin_level=10
disputed=yes
claimed_by=US:OH:HAM:Cincinnati:*
disputed_by=US:OH:HAM:Cincinnati:*

Community

In 2017, Miami University organized a mapping party to help the Humanitarian OSM Team map Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. [1][2][3][4] However, there hasn't been a meetup or mapping party focused on the Tri-State area – you're welcome to start one.

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. If you have any questions, you can also ask on the #local-ohio, #local-kentucky, and #local-indiana channels of the U.S. community's Slack workspace (invite yourself).

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=* and name:etymology=* tags; show a road fan the route networks page.

OSM in the wild

See also Ohio#OSM in the wild and Kentucky#OSM in the wild.

Transportation

  • The Cincinnati Bike Map, published in September of 2014, is entirely based on OSM data. 9,000 copies of the map were printed for free local distribution. It is available online and by mail on request.
  • Bus Detective, a local real-time transit app, locates stops on the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) basemap.
  • Red Bike's Android and iOS applications plot station locations against an OSM-based basemap and display OSM-based routes to stations, powered by Mapbox.
  • The Butler County RTA plots bus routes against an OSM-based Mapbox map (example).
  • OKI's Traffic Counts Web application visualizes traffic count data atop an OSM-powered Mapbox/Esri map.

Media

Every news media outlet in Cincinnati plots its online Doppler radar against an OSM-based basemap by Mapbox:

Community services

Miscellaneous

  • CincyInsights by the Cincinnati Office of Performance & Data Analytics plots various open datasets against an OSM-based Mapbox Streets style.
  • Clermont County Online Mapping, Clermont County's GIS portal, displays the openstreetmap-carto renderer as a basemap by default.
  • 3CDC and the Port Authority of Greater Cincinnati plot their real estate projects against the OSM-based Mapbox Light style.
  • The official Blink Cincinnati 2019 application for Android and iOS plotted light installations atop the OSM-based Mapbox Dark style and provides walking directions from the OSM-based Mapbox Directions API.
  • Walking Cincinnati, a travel guide by Danny Korman and Katie Meyer, uses OSM for its maps.

Progress

Main article: Cincinnati, Ohio/Statistics

Nearly complete

Acknowledging that everything can always be better, this is a list of things which are, for now, really quite accurate and thoroughly identified. Please add more things to this list if you've made a point of seeing that some particular thing in Greater Cincinnati has been mapped to the fullest; it's good to know what our strengths are!

  • Building footprints in urban areas
  • Major building footprints in suburban and rural areas
  • Cul-de-sacs (aka turning circles)
  • Marked pedestrian crossings
  • Coffee shops and bike shops for now, though such places are always changing
  • Schools and universities [7]
  • Street geometry and names have generally been vetted pretty thoroughly
  • Cincinnati neighborhood retail areas
  • Park boundaries and sports pitches in Cincinnati proper
  • High-voltage power lines and towers
  • Alleys are increasingly well-tagged. Almost all alleys are identified (service=alley), though many can still use names and other information.
  • Cycleways (bike paths, bike lanes and trails)
  • lanes=* on primary, secondary and tertiary streets
  • Golf courses (although details like golf cart paths, holes, and fairways are missing on many golf courses)
  • The Cincinnati Southern Railway (owned by the City of Cincinnati) is completely mapped to Chattanooga, although sidings, spurs, and level crossings are lacking in many places.
  • Turn lanes in southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana, amounting to 2.2% of turn lane miles in the U.S. as of January 2019

Plenty of room for improvement

Basemap display

  • Add buildings beyond Hamilton County.
  • Clean up buildings in Cincinnati that were drawn based on grainy Yahoo! aerial imagery.
  • Retag demolished buildings with demolished:building=*, especially in Hamilton County.
  • Classifying building=* tags, from a simple building=yes to something more informative. (apartments, retail, garage, house, church, etc.) [8]
  • Add tree cover in suburban and rural areas.
  • Add more 3D building data, particularly building heights.
  • Add more City of Cincinnati neighborhood boundaries as admin_level=10 relations, indicating any boundary disputes.

Search

  • Map and name residential subdivisions and shopping centers (they can get prominent labels, based on zoom level and area).
  • Add businesses pretty much everywhere.
  • Upgrade businesses to have brand tags suggested by iD. (Make sure to preserve more specific names and curly apostrophes if present.)
  • Make sense of neighborhood names within Covington.

Navigation

Public safety

  • Add retreat=yes to any Safe Place you come across (mostly fire stations, community centers, churches, and chain retailers).
  • Identify tornado sirens using OSIP, Mapbox, and Bing Streetside imagery.

Miscellaneous

Things to keep tabs on

See also

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