My name is Joseph. I’m interested in and very knowledgeable of geography, highways, and cars. I am from Woodbridge, Virginia and have also lived in Las Vegas, Nevada for a long time and am quite familiar with the places surrounding both states as a heavy traveler.

I am out of school and am currently awaiting employment. So—for the time being, and as long as I am at home or have access to a device and the internet—I have pretty much all the time in the world spend my time improving OpenStreetMap as well as surveying areas to assist me in doing so. With that, I am happy to help anyone with contributing to a large-scale project here as long as it is familiar with what I do on OSM.

My primary focuses on OSM are:

• Working on highway classification around the US, especially in places that I have lived or am very familiar with such as Virginia, Nevada, DC, Maryland, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio, and Florida

• Working on place classification, adding previously uncharted unincorporated communities and census-designated places or adding population and Wikipedia/Wikidata tags to existing ones, as well as updating places tagged as hamlets from the GNIS import to localities, villages, neighborhoods, quarters, and suburbs when applicable

• Updating construction projects which appear as under construction or recently completed on the map by researching site plans, mostly focusing on highway projects or newly-built residential streets

• Mapping various footways and cycleways, mostly along major road corridors

• Adding businesses, mostly those in strip malls, downtowns of smaller cities and towns, and at rural highway crossroads

• Detailing downtown areas of small cities, which involves a lot of the previous two focuses

The majority of edits I make surrounding proposed/under-construction/recently-completed projects in Virginia and Nevada are sourced by plat maps if not news articles or site plans. Below are the two I use the most. Given that their imagery is more recent than that provided by OSM, they really come in handy!

• PWC County Mapper (Prince William County, Virginia) (imagery updated every 2 years around winter)
• OpenWeb (Clark County, Nevada) (imagery updated every 4-6 months)

For other road information in Virginia, I use the VDOT LRS Route Master.

For populated place information around the US, I use the TIGERWeb Decennial map and this 2020 US CDP map.

In massive edits, I will occasionally forget a thing or two or make a mistake. If I do, please let me know and I can guarantee you it was unintentional.

Virginia state highway classification page, started and primarily contributed to by me