A nice April Fools from Firebox – a disposable cardboard bike. The design bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bixi-designed bikes used for the London Cycle Hire scheme – complete with ID number. Also includes a paper-chain chain and egg-box saddle – I like!
I’ve just got back from Sicily, where I was taking part in the Mediterranean Orienteering Championships. The three-stage event, consisting of two sprint races and a middle-distance race, was organised by Park World Tour Italia. Highlights of the trip were the spectacular event locations, particularly the finish arenas, and the passion and enthusiasm of the organisers. Sicily in late March is very pleasant – sunny and warm but not too hot. The locals were wrapped up well but the Scandinavians and Brits at the event were only too happy to enjoy the lovely conditions.
Day 1 was a sprint race around the historic old centre of Sciacca, on the south coast of Sicily. The area was steep, with many staircases and narrow, winding streets. Police kept cars out of the area for the duration of the race, although runners still had to dodge many moped riders. The finish arena, in a historic plaza surrounded by palm trees and curious locals, was further enhanced by the appearance of many dancers, wearing hats with three legs coming out of them (the Scilian coat-of-arms) who not only danced to the various Europop-esque tunes, but also cheered in each finisher. The costumes and performers were from a more general parade a few days before.
I didn’t have a great race – I loved the map and the city (once we got there – Nick Manfredi having driven us 100km in the wrong direction!), but I went a bit too fast and made a silly 90-degree mistake around half-way through the race, running off the map and wasting four minutes trying to get back on the course. Four minutes for a 20-minute sprint race is pretty disastrous, so I finished comfortably in the bottom quarter.
Day 2 was another sprint, this time in and around the ruined village of Gibellina. The village destroyed in an earthquake in 1968 and the central part of it has been turned into a giant concrete memorial, with the road network preserved but the housing outlines replaced by 1m high concrete walls. An area of terraces (i.e lots of tricky and dangerous one-side walls) and the housing rubble of another part of the village were also used.
I didn’t make any big errors this time, but was a bit slow around the course – I just didn’t have the sprint pace. Afterwards we had a look around the new Gibellina town, built to replace the village and full of modern art. Kind of like Milton Keynes but with more of an emphasis on public art and less on roundabouts…
Finally, there was a middle distance race around the ruined Greek temples of Selinunte. We could see the finish arena being constructed on the village pier, from our hotel breakfast room overlooking the Mediterranean. The race itself included quite a bit of dune running, as well as a spectacular section in one of the temple complexes. Unfortunately, on leaving the complex I slipped and fell at speed onto one of the temple blocks – I was able to run to the end, but it looks like I’ve managed to break one of my ribs – so no running for a few weeks. Luckily this was on the final day so didn’t spoil an amazing orienteering weekend and unexpected holiday.
Congratulations to Sarah Rollins who finished second in a very competitive field of Swedish world-championship orienteers and other internationals, so winning a EUR400 cash prize.
Miami Beach now has its own bike share. DecoBike went live last week. Currently there are just over 300 bikes available. At one point yesterday, over a quarter of them were in use – an impressive uptake just one week into the scheme.
Wikipedia says that “Miami Beach is one of only a handful of U.S. locales that has never recorded snow or snow flurries in recorded weather history.” Sounds ideal for a cycling city. Denver and Minneapolis, two of the other big bike share schemes in the U.S., close for the winter (Denver has just restarted for 2011) while the Washington DC/Arlington scheme has had to struggle with another severe winter and lots of snow. Miami Beach doesn’t have such things to worry about.
You can of course see where the bikes are, on my bike share map, along with those in over 30 other cities.
Scottish Orienteering have produced this video of the Park World Tour race that was held in Perth City Centre last year.
Bear with the gratuitous slow-mo and the guy jumping out of the bin at the start – and note how the women’s race is completely dominated by the Swedes!
I was unable to go to the (spectator) race, I wish I had made it, it looks like it was great!
ITO‘s OSM Analysis table is updated daily, showing the number of roads in each district/borough in the UK that are in the OS Locator* dataset that are missing in OpenStreetMap. There is an accompanying choropleth map (you need to login to seet it) showing coverage across the UK. Currently southern England and Scotland’s central belt are looking pretty good, while Wales and parts of northern England still have quite some way to go.
As well as the map and summary table, ITO produce a map showing the approximate location of each missing (or misspelled) road, as a rectangular bounding box. This makes finding the missing roads quite easy. Groundwork is needed to check signposts and confirm the names. Often, discrepancies arise simply from OpenStreetMap not having apostrophes for the street name, and the Ordnance Survey having them, or vice versa. The signposts normally provide the definitive answer, but in quite a few cases, the sign at one end of the street will have an apostrophe and the other end will be missing it – or the names attached to houses will differ from the nearby street signs.
Hackney was around 94% complete a few weeks ago, with around 80 errors flagged up. It’s a small borough (in size, if not population) so I reckoned it was possible to bike around all 80 locations in a day – with a suitable route that would hopefully be a good answer to the Travelling Salesman Problem.
In the end, I managed it in a couple of afternoons. I found quite quickly that in most cases, the street was already in OpenStreetMap but just misnamed or unnamed. In around 5-10% of cases, the Ordnance Survey was wrong, and street signs on the ground suggested either that OSM was correct, or that both sources was wrong. As the OS was in general right, I only stopped to note where this wasn’t the case – so, I was able to cover a lot of ground quite quickly. I still ended up having to cycle nearly 100km within a borough that is roughly 4-5km across.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the exercise is it allowed me to visit all parts of the borough, including places I had never been to before despite having lived there for several years. I discovered that Stoke Newington Church Road is indeed massively gentrified out of all proportion to the surrounding area. I found unexpected gems like The Mothers Square (no apostrophe) and that Hackney Downs is quite a pleasant park. I also found the huge Pembury Estate. This was where one of the Ordnance Survey’s mistakes was – the streets were named in the wrong order. Perhaps the original surveyor didn’t like to hang around.
Of course no map can ever be 100% “complete”. Even with a perfect match to OS Locator, the latter may be out of date, or be missing roads due to missed records. The map may be “complete” in terms of roads but other detail still needs to be added.
Anyway Hackney is now 100% complete with respect to OS Locator, making it the 12th such district in the UK. Another 400-odd to go…
* OS Locator is one of the products in Ordnance Survey’s OpenData release.
Look what’s appeared on the north side of the Olympic Stadium in east London:
A section of what looks like wrap has appeared on the outside of a small part of the building. On the top left, in tiny writing in the jagged London 2012 font, it reads “Be Safe Home Safe” which is the current safety slogan on site. An image of what the stadium might look like once the wrap goes all the way around can be found on the portacabins for Team Stadium:
Other things I noticed today are that a lot of the hoardings surrounding the lower part of the stadium perimeter have disappeared, revealing part of the huge concrete plaza that will be in front of the stadium, and also allowing a glimpse inside, where rows and rows of white seats can be seen.
The Orbit is also gradually increasing in height, although not as quickly as before. A big line of red pieces, looking like giant , lie beside the structure.
Inspired by Andrew Kesper’s ABC before/after photos of the Japan tsunami destruction, I have created a “scrubber” photo of the London Olympic construction site in the east of the capital, using the imagery available in Google Earth. The aerial photography is copyright Google and Bluesky. You can the see the original imagery in Google Earth by using the program’s timeline slider, there are some other years also available there, even one from December 1945.
Move your mouse over the picture, to swipe between the 2006 and 2010 imagery. [Now offline]
I’m using JQuery to handle the mouse positioning. Creating such a graphic is quite straightforward. There’s only about 10 lines of JavaScript code involved, plus some CSS styling. It even sort of works on the iPhone – tap once to reposition the dividing line. All credit to Andrew and ABC for the idea.
I spotted this sign attached to the edge of the Eton Manor site, on the Eastway just north of the London 2012 construction site, last weekend:
Lots of interesting information on here. As well as the “Hackney Marshes Centre” (aka South Marshes Community Hub) and the “Northern Spectator Transport Mall” (aka East Marsh) which I’ve covered before, there is mention of a new road – referred to as the “Lifeline” here, it is more specifically called the “Northern Retail Lifeline” in the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) planning documents I’ve dug up.
The Westfield Stratford City development was planned before the Olympics were awarded to London, and it always intended to open in 2011. As it stands, the triangular site is surrounded on two out of three sides by the huge Olympic construction site, and so would have been rather difficult to access upon opening, except from Stratford, until the Olympic security fences start to come down in 2013. To alleviate this poor access, the ODA was apparently obliged to provide a special access route from Walthamstow, Hackney and the A12 to the north, through the Olympic building site, to Stratford City.
The planning documents reveal some interesting information about the road.
Firstly, and most disappointingly, should I want to cycle over to Waitrose (this will not be the Stratford I know!) from Hackney Wick, I won’t be able to.
“NRL will only be for motor vehicles no larger than ‘4×4/SUV’ type vehicles. Furthermore, neither public transport nor pedestrians nor cyclists will be permitted”
Boo!
The road seems to start at the A12 junction, swinging sharply east and passing north of the newly completed Velodrome (V) and BMX track (X), before heading down to the Athlete’s Village (A). It then goes around the village boundary in an anticlockwise direction, passing the fluted white Basketball Arena (B) before heading straight down to join the Stratford City boundary. You can see much of the route in the plan here. I’ve drawn what I think is the whole route, on an OpenStreetMap on the right – also contains data CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap contributors.
At the north end of the road,
“The northern vehicle screening area, adjacent to the A12 Lea Interchange, will stop and check traffic” … “The security guard will indicate whether a vehicle has been selected by hand held signals and a display board.”
This sounds fairly involved, but in fact the security arrangements for Canary Wharf are rather similar and this hasn’t stopped it being rather popular.
There might be some bad news if you are disabled, as:
“The vehicle height restrictors will match the Stratford City car park restrictors of 2.2m. However, Stratford City allow 2.7m high vehicles on the ground floor for high sided disabled vehicles so these will not be able to exit or enter via the NRL.”
Once you are on the Lifeline road, don’t think about stopping for some nice close-up photos of the Velodrome, as this is not designed to be a welcoming road. The fence on either the side of the road:
“will be 3.6m high and does not include the standard power topping implemented on the Outer Perimeter Fence (OPF) across the majority of the Park.”
The “power topping” is a slightly euphemistic way of describing electric fences. Presumably the security checkpoints make the Lifeline a “partially secure zone” which is why they are deemed not required here.
Also:
“CCTV cameras will be mounted on extended fence posts every 40m at a height of 5.8m”
The road will open with Stratford City this autumn and then close again in June next year for the “Games lock down”, before presumably reopening while the rest of the park get transformed into post-Games mode.
The entrance to the Lifeline appears to be under intense construction at the moment – the Eastway road is a bit of a mess. East-bound cyclists have to walk a considerable distance along the pedestrian footpath. The Eastway is an important cycle link between Hackney and Leyton. It is set for improvement too though – I spotted another application for a dedicated cycle and footbridge further along to the east. The west-bound route is also a real mess currently, with a lot of weaving around various bits of construction – or braving it on the dual-carriageway.
Some more interesting planning documents I found are this one which maps out the internal roads of the Olympic Park, and lists their names – Stadium Gardens, Handball Approach etc. Also, this letter outlines the plans for the park area west of the velodrome – the “North West Parklands”. Originally this was going to be a dramatic double crossing of the river by the cycle track – part of the “Velo Park”, but now, with the track being somewhat downgraded and placed east of the Velodrome, this is going to be more traditional open space, an “interim landscape zone” with presumably the eventual intent to build. There is a nice map here.
[Update: The somewhat depressing (in that apparently nothing good is ever done on site) Games Monitor blog spotted this a while back.]
It looks like the East Marsh, part of Hackney Marshes, the world’s biggest complex of football pitches, is about to disappear under concrete, to form a coach park for the London Olympics. I was hoping it was never going to happen, as a quarter of the marsh is already fenced off, and that construction site hadn’t grown in size for a while, but it does look like it will be expanding right across the field from 22 May. The fields should be restored to grassland and football pitches a couple of years after the games. Fingers crossed.
(Although personally I think it would make a great site for a big housing development. There is very little housing in the immediate area around East Marsh, apart from a tiny terrace of travellers’ homes.)
In the Google Maps aerial imagery reproduced below, you can see the East Marsh, with a quarter already taken out by the Olympics construction site (the photo is from last June.) The now-completed velodrome is on the bottom right, with a bridge across the A12. Another bridge, “L01”, is now in place across the next road north, linking to the existing construction area on the East Marsh – you can see the red support trusses in place in the photo, built in advance of the bridge lift. The old “Cow Bridge” links the East Marsh to the rest of the Hackney Marshes, while a new set of changing rooms and cafe is under construction to the south-west of this bridge – the facility is also now completed and open. There are plans, I believe, for a new footbridge, to cross the channel and provide a more direct link from the changing rooms to the East Marsh, once it is restored.
To the top-right of the marsh, is the relocated Spitalfields Market. Why the plaza here couldn’t have been used instead for the coach park, for the four weeks of the Olympics and Paralympics, I do not know.
Imagery ©2011 Google, DigitalGlobe, Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky, GeoEye, Getmapping plc, Bluesky, The GeoInformation Group.
I presented today, to a meeting of the OBIS Project (a grouping of the cities around Europe that have or are implementing bike share schemes) some of the innovative ways that developers have used the data from the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme in London. I looked at some iPhone and Android apps and some visualisations and analysis, and also touched on data from schemes in other countries.
There was some interesting questions at the end – such as why I thought some cities might not want to release their cycle hire data for third party use and why TfL hasn’t yet released an API for the cycle data. Also, a comment on why cyclists in Lyon might pedal faster on Wednesdays – is it (perhaps faster) men pedalling to the mid-week football matches?
Thanks to TfL for organising the event, which was held at their lovely
Palestra offices, and the CTC for inviting me.
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