Since it is a recent topic on the french mailing-list, I began some weeks ago to map the bus lanes in Aix-En-Provence, because I believe that OpenStreetMap could take a real advantage in the field of public transports, where google maps is actually wrong in my own opinion (despite their effort to develop a free specification of handling this kind of datas, see http://google.com/transit for more information).

In France - and I think it's the same everywhere -, there are a huge number of different companies which handle the mission of transporting people, but no web application does exist yet to compute and harmonize this whole mess, and a lot of these companies are only giving some PDF in their official websites.

How long before an application where one could say "I want to go here from there, and I won't pay more than x euros for that" ? :-D Of course it is not in the field of OSM to gather the transport timetables, but once we have the bus lanes, I guess that at least 90% of the work is done.

PS : Thanks to the guys behind http://www.öpnvkarte.de/ , your mashup is really awesome !

PS2 : Why not a batch import of google transit-compliant companies ?

PS3 : Still around 15 lines to map, good night ;-)

Dear diary,

I just come from a french LUG meeting, where I met a geograph who discovered OpenStreetMap "by my fault" ; he found the project wonderful when it deals with town centers and highly populated places, but told me that a region he appreciates of "Les Alpes" was not mapped and, for this reason, he was happy that no contributor has mapped it yet. The reason was "people do not make efforts anymore today, they have everything available on the internet about everything / everywhere". The fact that it is not mapped on OSM would probably force people to go out and enjoy the place without having the possibility to search on OSM / Google / Wikipedia / whatever and "get it" while still standing passively on their sofa... This reaction let me a bit puzzled. So, what do we have to do ? Do we have to keep some mysterious places unmapped ?

Anyway, town centers or not, "mysterious places" or not, it is always with pleasure and fun that i go out from my home with my GPS, trying to map a (very little) piece of my planet, to add datas into this wonderful project. Thanks again, and good night !

Today, I added a non-mapped quarter of Aix-En-Provence into the OSM datas. I think I have forgotten a few things, so I will probably return there a next time. I noticed by comparing google's map that there were a few errors on "official and proprietary" datas by the way.

About Aix, a mapper is willing to organize a mapping-party for the end of this month. Who wants to attend it around here ? Of course I'll be in, but for the moment we are only 2 :-)

Dear diary,

I'm contributing since february 2008, but never posted here. So let's give it a try.

My current town in France (Aix-En-Provence) is in progress, thanks to the work of a few OSMers. All "bicycle_rental" amenities have been taggued yet. Okay, there were just 16 (compared to the thousands in Paris) ... But I'm ready for an another goal now. I tried via the yahoo imagery to draw some buildings (including "private" / personal buildings) in the area but I don't know if it is a good idea or not. They all appear in pink on the map, and for sure this is not the priority. Perhaps should I focus on the streets (namings, oneways, ...) before trying to have a surcharged map with full of (useless ?) things.

While reading some stuffs on the net this evenning, I just fall on this : http://www.procedural.com/cityengine/features.html ; it looks like an interesting project - proprietary, but interesting anyway :-P. Relying on the webpage (and if I understand correctly), it can use OSM datas in order to make 3D views of cities (a colleague from my french school will work on her final internship on this software). But what about the licensing of the work resulting in the use of this application ? I hope to see a lot of 3D-rendered towns under creative commons. Wait and see ...

Sorry for my bad english, and see you later !