Street Signs Project- Working in the field (virtually)

Mike Wahl (our great intern- anyone want to hire him?) has been saving time and money, which is great in times like these. We needed a street sign layer for our Cityworks project. Essentially, Cityworks is a GIS-enabled work order system, and we want to be able to tie work orders to sign feature classes. We didn't need sub-meter accuracy, and getting GPS-points in the field would have been overkill (in this case- there are plenty of places for GPS collection).

This is written by Mike:

The purpose of this project is to identify and locate all city street signs and street lights within the City of Redlands that have not been geocoded previously. In this screenshot the red line indicates a street segment that has been checked and all the street signs on that street have been identified. The green line means that the street segment has not yet been checked. The blue line is a segment that has been selected (as seen in the ‘Attributes of Streets’ box at the bottom) and will be checked. The small dots represent the street lights and the large pink dots represent the street signs. The highlighted street sign (toward the middle of the screen) is a stop sign as can be seen in the TYPE column of the ‘Attributes’ box at the left. There are many types of street signs and a large part of this project is to identify which type they are.


In order to identify and locate the city street signs we use the Street View feature in Google Maps. The stop sign seen above is the street sign that was highlighted in Arc Map. The Google Map Street View is current data and by using it the project can be completed quicker than if we were to take gps coordinates from every individual street sign in the field. The only problems are that some of the signs are hard to see and some of the streets are not covered either due to construction or that the street was not on their list to cover. Despite these limitations the majority of street signs can be identified and any field work will be cut down to a minimum if need be.


At this time (11/25/08) nearly half of the city streets have been checked. This process has taken over forty hours to accomplish in what would have taken several months to accomplish in the field.