East of Vancouver, BC is the University of British Columbia (UBC). The local transit agency TransLink serves UBC as part of the Metro Vancouver area and is expanding its bus routes.

Two fairly new bus loops can be found at UBC. The university currently has three bus loops. The bus loop in the north is the oldest, and two new ones have been built south of its location. Furthermore, a transit exchange is under construction. This new transit exchange will be located on ground level underneath student housing between the bus loops in the north and in the centre. The area has seen a lot of construction lately, with more buildings still being build.

To find the area, search for “UBC Aquatic Centre”. The aquatic centre is already finished and surrounded with construction sites.

As there are a lot of new buildings and infrastructure being build, OpenStreetMap should get updated to reflect the changes. At the beginning of 2019 I updated the positions and bus stop numbers (mapped using Key:ref) and bay numbers (mapped using Key:local_ref) of bus stops in the three bus loops. Improvements can be made to the bus routes which get mapped as relations. A bus route references and ordered list of stop positions and bus stops, followed by all streets the bus drives on. The mapping process is described in detail on the wiki page for public transport. At UBC these relations are outdated. The bus stops of most routes have been moved by TransLink as new streets became available.

Please consider updating those routes, if you are familiar with the buses. The wiki is a great place to learn about the correct mapping of route relations. If you want to help, but don’t feel comfortable editing the bus routes yet, consider updating buildings at UBC by adding names, addresses and public amenities. To learn about mapping bus stops and bus routes, send me a message or come to our monthly meetup in Burnaby.

Every now and then Vancouver’s fire hydrants are a topic at the Greater Vancouver meetup. I assume this is because most fire hydrants have a reference id printed on them which makes them identifiable and StreetComplete started asking for their type.

We had noticed before that there is an area which includes parts of Downtown where hydrant refs start with a 0 (digit zero) or an O (letter O as in Oscar). The character is hard to identify on the physical tags but does looks different than the 0 (digit zero) in the number part.

To lift the ‘secret’, I looked up the refs in the open data catalogue of Vancouver link. All refs start on a letter. This means, the character is question is the letter O as in Oscar.

Vancouver uses the letters E until W from West to East throughout the city. A until D do not seem to be used but would fit onto the University Endowment Lands where UBC is located.

Posts with pictures:

• https://mastodonten.de/@jaller94/100462372351029434 (all 6504 fire hydrants)

• https://mastodonten.de/@jaller94/100462411318757401 (the three subsystems)

• https://mastodonten.de/@jaller94/100462443475442296 (fire hydrants starting with O)

P.S. While we tag the refs as found on the fire hydrants (e.g. H13006), the city has a different id schema for them: WH-H13-006.

At tonight’s Vancouver OpenStreetMap meetup we were wondering about the state of drinking fountains in Vancouver. The tag is amenity=drinking_water.

A search in Overpass Turbo tells us that in the rough boundaries of Vancouver 112 water fountains were mapped.

In the open data catalogue of the City of Vancouver 239 water fountains are listed. That means we have a coverage of less than 50 % of Vancouver’s drinking fountains in OSM. Errors in this assumption might include duplicates and outdated data in OSM as well as drinking fountains which are not operated by the city.