…and not just London. It covers 25 cities in the UK.
There are some omissions in the coverage of course – e.g. Chancery Lane is a notable missing street. But my home street in Hackney is there, and the imagery extends right out to the edge of the metropolis.
Here’s some fare-dodgers getting booked by the police, outside the main entrance to UCL.
Photo Copyright Google.
I noticed for the first time yesterday, that individual trees are being stored in OSM, and being rendered on the default OSM/Mapnik map:
The green dots are points tagged with natural=tree, here at City University London.
OSM documentation for the natural=tree tag
This got me thinking – might I be able to build a “proper” orienteering map using entirely OpenStreetMap? Street-O* maps can already be produced with OSM data – this was some work I did last summer, and also am working on – but being able to produce an ISOM** map directly from OSM data is quite appealing. (ISSOM*** might be harder, as this standard requires roads to be shown at their actual width, rather than being linear features with fixed-width cartography.)
Most of the orienteering-specific features, such as pits and earth walls, wouldn’t show on the “public” renders of OSM data – the ‘general maps’, but a customised rendering could show these and have specialised cartography for them. As well as adding these new features, some existing features (e.g. natural=woodland) which are rendered on the general maps could have tags added to indicate the runnability level – orienteering maps have four levels of “greenness” for woods, and sometimes tree canopies are shown in white – this could be inferred from a size tag associated with a natural=tree point, medium being shown as a circle with a 5m circumference, for instance.
Many other features are already on OSM – paths, tracks, minor and major roads, as used in the Street-O maps, and also vegetation types, gates, walls and fences, that would appear in an ISOM/ISSOM based map.
My local park, Victoria Park, could be having a lot more detail added to it soon.
* Street-O: An informal orienteering discipline, run in urban areas with simple maps showing the street and path networks, and little else. Typically A4 at 1:10000
** ISOM: International Specification for Orienteering Maps. “Normal” orienteering races use these maps, which are full colour and very detailed, typically A3-A5 at 1:10000.
*** ISSOM: International Specification for Sprint Orienteering Maps. A much newer specification designed for the increasingly popular urban and sprint races, the map is almost a plan view of the ground, with roads shown at their correct width, sometimes with pavements shown seperately. Typically A3-A4 at 1:4000 or 1:5000.
Some things I have been doing recently:
London to Eastbourne
I cycled 130km along most of National Cycle Route 21 on Saturday, from London to nearly Eastbourne (nearly, because I set out late as usual and it got too dark to do the final 30km). As usual with NCN routes, it tends to take you up hill and down dale when a perfectly good quiet road nearby would have sufficed. However, this route is generally well signposted, and everything after Crawley is very pleasant indeed. Plus you don’t get to cycle underneath an airport terminal and between runway approach lights. I’ve written an article for the route on Wikipedia – it includes the “NCN” box which links to the other routes that have articles – currently 1/3rd of them do.
Hopefully, at some point, the Wikipedia route articles, and the OpenStreetMap/OpenCycleMap maps and data, will become the de-facto “official” information sources for the routes.
The National Byway
One thing I found when doing the cycle is that some sections are not suitable for road bikes. I’m on the point of purchasing a road bike myself, so it was with some interest that I discovered the National Byway – which aims to signpost quiet countryside road-routes particularly suited for cycling. It looks like a nice idea, even if the logo reminds me of a brand of bread, but it’s a shame this doesn’t come under the fold of Sustrans as a “road-bike routes” category – e.g. it would be nice to have consistency with the waymarking being blue (like Sustrans) rather than brown. There’s also no decent online mapping – I hope it’s not just about selling maps.
Map Milton Keynes in a Weekend
Finally I’m organising a mapping weekend in Milton Keynes. The town has been identified as one of the least mapped areas in the UK on OpenStreetMap, and it’s not far from London, so this is an opportunity to fix that. It also has some completely “blank canvas” areas, which is quite exciting for any London-based OpenStreetMapper living in a “near complete” city.
The event is on the 16th-17th May and you can sign up. No prior experience needed. Based on the rough-and-ready approximation that one mapper can survey the area that 1000 people live in every hour, and four two-hour sessions in the weekend, we probably need around 25 mappers to get the whole 180,000 population town completed in the weekend.
I’m bagging the area with the concrete cows in it.
Photo by diamondgeezer
This summer, I’m aiming to take advantage of the rare confluence of a job with a good amount of holiday allowance, and the fact I’m earning, to do quite a bit this summer.
The plans so far are:
I’m on the lookout for the most dramatic viaducts you can cycle or walk across, in the UK. A bit of Googling hasn’t revealed a definitive list, so I’m building up on here – suggestions welcome.
So far, I know about:
A useful resource is here.
Here’s a couple of odd names on Google Maps
Someone, somewhere, typed this in:
Where did the “f” come from?
Both of these screengrabs are from Google Maps, they are (c) 2009 Google with Map data (c) 2009 Tele Atlas.
I’ve been playing around with Tiles@Home over the last few days – here’s a tile that I just generated, while changing some transparency settings.
Hmm, back to the drawing board.
Google has added a tube/metro network layer for various cities, including London.
On the one hand, a geographically accurate map is useful for, for example, realising that you might as well just walk between Blackfriars and Farringdon. On the other hand, it isn’t very useful when you are actually using the tube, to have each station connected to the next with straight lines, as overlaps can cause problems. In the screen-grab below, the Victoria line (light blue) doesn’t stop at Manor House, and the Piccadilly line (dark blue) doesn’t stop at Harringay Green Lanes.
Something very odd seems to be going on in Hammersmith – the H&C (pink) line is shown ending several hundred metres north of its true end station, at what looks like a depo. The actual H&C end station is shown instead as being connected to the Piccadilly line (dark blue) whereas you would actually need to go to the bottom station to get a Piccadilly train.
There is also a mysterious extra link on the London Overground line which doesn’t appear on any tube map.
…and while we are on the topic of Google and public transport, my local station appears to have split into two:
The one on the left is correct, the one on the right doesn’t exist. All along the route in fact, the stations are mostly doubled up, with the “x” one being correct and the “x Rail” one being wrong.
Thank goodness we have OpenStreetMap where, if something’s wrong, we can go in and immediately fix it. Being my local area, of course, the map is already pristine:
…was Google StreetView for London.
It’s already in several European cities, including Milan where Remo organised a virtual Street-O, and the StreetView camera cars have been spotted all over London.
Here’s hoping it will be going live Real Soon Now.
Recent changes I’ve made – Red/orange this weekend, green/yellow last week.
From my OpenStreetMap diary:
I’ve been making quite a few updates to East London recently, including: