Indeed the Bing imagery is one of the greatest non-financial gifts ever given by a technology company, regardless of motives.
When I started working on OSM about a decade ago my area was a greenish blur on the photo underlay and everything had to be manually positioned from GPX tracks. It took hours to map a street and given GPS error margins it was never certain to be exact.
Now anyone can log-in and start tracing roads / paths / buildings and it just takes a couple of physical visits to backfill the enumeration and names.
When I started working on OSM about a decade ago my area was a greenish blur on the photo underlay and everything had to be manually positioned from GPX tracks. It took hours to map a street and given GPS error margins it was never certain to be exact.
Now anyone can log-in and start tracing roads / paths / buildings and it just takes a couple of physical visits to backfill the enumeration and names.