Yeah, a lot of people aren't comfortable giving away data which they paid a lot of money for. I'm hoping that being in contact with the Newcastle Cycleways Movement people will spawn a bit of interest in OSM too, if nothing else their webmaster now knows about it :p.

* It can destroy your drivetrain :p.

But yeah: there's no bad weather, only bad clothes :).

Somebody would find it interesting. I know Energy Australia (electricity distribution company) keep every pole they own in their GIS and load that data onto Garmin units which get handed out to employees.

Never underestimate the demand for trivial details :).

surface=unpaved is what I've been using for unpaved roads which aren't tracks. This would be great for Australian rendering as we've got a lot of unpaved road in rural areas.

I didn't look at the park to the North of the washout but the park to the South of it seems fine. Well, I didn't see it pre-flood, but the only major issue seemed to be that there's a whopping great big chunk of corrugated iron pipe sitting on the grass. The picnic tables etc were all still intact and there's very little flood debris on the grass.

Oh, and obviously the footway which went under the road doesn't exist anymore.

I'm more concerned with getting the road network finished as that's more important from a "oh wow, this map might actually be useful" perspective as opposed to the "oh wow, this map has so much more detail than any other" one. Basically I want the first impressions of new users to be ones of completeness, basically combat the "pfft, this map sucks, it doesn't even have my street!" attitude.

Anyway, my point is that I'll leave the details for you :).

Unfortunately I'm only here for another 6 weeks or so and as such can't be around to update the map. Jason Stirk is the next most active mapper in the region, hopefully it'll show up on his radar.

Can you imagine the marketing that OSM can have over commercial map providers? "Updates 365x more often than the competition!"

Yeah, this road has been out of action for more than a month and there's no sign of repairs starting yet so chances are the road will be out of action at least until Christmas.

Start a proposal for barrier=washout? :p.

Oh, and it was never a bridge. The creek ran through a corrugated iron tunnel...which is now sitting about 40m away, in the park.

Yeah it was pretty silly :p. Did you catch "Whatever" on the ABC last Thursday (in place of Catalyst)? It discussed teenage risk assessment and it's origins in brain physiology. Basically my brain (at age 24) is probably stuck at about an 18yo's level in terms of risk assessment :p.

On the up side I lost 1.4kg yesterday, if the digital scales in this house are accurate enough to give a reliable measure.

I think there's a limit to how much say a routing programme should have on deciding where you go. If you need it to tell you to walk onto the platform then you've missed out on a cornerstone of civilization. A routing programme should just say "go to station x", then let your brain do the rest. At most it should tell you where the ticket booth is, but this is only non-trivial at train stations such as Central, in Sydney.

From a rendering perspective I think it's a great idea to map any extra detail that can be humanly collected. This is what separates OSM from commercial maps: we bother collecting data which is not commercially viable to collect. From this perspective railway=platform is probably the most logical tag. A platform is more than a footway area, it's a raised concrete structure, often with seating/toilets/cover/etc.

That seems to raise another issue: should toilets inside a train station (ie: beyond the turnstiles) be tagged fee=yes in Australia?

Oh, and nice work on the house numbers :). They certainly make the map look a lot more complete! It will need a lot of volunteers to get a complete set of data though. Maybe somebody should work on an "un-numbered street" map to join the noname/maplint layers.

After about 40mins of tweaking the wheel seems to be coming along nicely. The diameter is constant and the lateral wobble is within ~1mm. The dishing is still a fair way out but that's a simple, although time consuming, adjustment.

All in all it's been a great learning experience. Can't wait to try it out on the road :).

Thanks for the link :). I'll look into buying it if the spoke tweaking takes too long. I'd just need to get permission to use my parents' credit card on the Internet, they're typical paranoid baby boomers.

Might need to get a Visa Debit card...

The OSM history viewer was documented by the creator in a diary entry several weeks ago. I didn't bookmark it though. From memory green were new ways and there were other colours for deleted and moved. Probably yellow and green but don't quote me on it.

Why do you need to be careful mapping? You could do something really radical and get in contact with the other active mappers with the excuse of coordinating your efforts. OSM will benefit and you may even make some friends from it :).

I guess it would be *possible* to camp there, but not after much rain. There weren't any "no camping" signs but the ground is seriously mushy at the moment.

Osmarender doesn't look to render anything differently with the surface=unpaved tag. Ref: Pete, Boorie and Currie Streets.

I might write a patch for it or something. At least then maps I render will be drawn more informative and if it doesn't get accepted then such is life.

Bad luck about the layoff mate. My girlfriend was recently laid off and is having heaps of trouble finding work so good luck.

On the upside you now have a great opportunity to do training so that your cheap carbon neutral transport can become a big part of your life :).

If you want confirmation that you data has been uploaded before waiting for the renderer then you can enable the data layer. Click the blue/white + symbol in the top right and then select the "data" checkbox. A clickable overlay will appear which shows all the raw data for the area in view. Clicking an object then brings up its tags, history etc.

Also, you can force a re-render of the osmarender layer by going to www.informationfreeway.org, zooming in to level 12 on the area in question (the zoom level is indicated in the bottom right) then ctrl+click'ing on the map tile you want rendered. This usually gets completed within 10-20mins.

Since OSM can only source from un-copyrited sources you can't have another map as a background to trace over. With the exception of out of copyright maps such as old Ordinance Survey maps of the UK. So basically it's NASA Landsat and Yahoo! imagery only.

The GPX trace you made is useful for the map as waterways can often be difficult to see on low resolution imagery :). So please feel free to draw any rivers and streams in.

And a special thanks to all those people who run T@H. If Internet bandwidth was cheaper in Australia I'd run it permanently too.

Wow, tagging street numbers looks really fiddly and data intensive. Good on you for collecting them but I'm sticking to navigational data for the time being.