I just realised it has been 18 months since I made a diary entry! Rather than writing diary entries, I have been busy mapping. It has been over a year since Andrews Bridge at Birchville collapsed (on 29 October 2015) and I subsequently mapped this in OSM, along with the then proposed emergency access road that the Upper Hutt City Council had commenced building. Within days of me adding the proposed road as an OSM way another OSM mapper had plotted it using GPS! I was impressed. And the road was still being built, too! (This even motivated me to get my own GPS unit.) Since then I have been back and forth over this Private Road many time, usually with my own GPS unit plotting my track. (One day I should upload these tracks to OSM.)

A few days ago I sort of fell over the OSM Inspector and went back and looked at some of the work I had done over the last 18 months. I came across a few issues, but nothing that I couldn’t correct fairly easily, except that Bridge Road remains an island, despite being connected to the rest of the world by a “Private Road” even though I have changed the tags on the way to indicate there is designated restricted access rather than the road actually being “private”.

I suppose this OSM Inspector issue actually makes sense. Because the Private Road is not tagged as a public road so there is no publicly available routing to Bridge Road. Hopefully the issue will be resolved once the new bridge is installed - I am told - at the end of the month. Currently only the foundations are in place. So I think I will need to wait until opening day, so I can walk across the new bridge while plotting a GPS track.