Recently, a one-way road I use has become closed to motor traffic, and is now a two-way cycleway. Because people have been complaining that satnavs have been sending people the wrong way, I though that a day or so after updating openstreetmap, I’d try to notify the commercial mapping companies and see how easy it is to report their routing as inaccurate.

Openstreetmap was the quickest, but I know the tools, I could do it myself, using Potlatch. It showed up on Mapnik in minutes, and routing engines like cyclestreets.net will probably get their routing data refreshed in a day or two.

Google Maps was pretty much the easiest of the commercial providers, from an end-user’s perspective. I plotted a route, and clicked on report a problem with a route, selected the leg of the route, and gave a plain english description of what needed changing, and some oompah loompah’s at the chocolate factory will at some point (probably in a week or two) update their map data, so anyone using Google Maps / Google Navigation won’t be send the wrong way in their motor vehicles. Google Maps already highlighted the fact that the road was temporarily closed for road works (yet it still offered it as a car routing route).

Navteq (now Nokia maps) was reasonably easy, I could select a segment of road, and request tags to be changed to state it’s now two-way and that motorised traffic was not allowed, however, I was not able to tag it as a cycle way. It seems that they don’t do cycle mapping. Garmin users might see the changes in as little as three months from now.

Tele Atlas (now Tomtom) was impossible.I signed up to the web site, went to the map reporting tool, and could zoom in to the area, but had no way of actually proceeding to reporting a problem with the map, the instructions on how to report problems with the map data didn’t reflect reality.. Apparently, if you have a suitable tomtom device, you can report problems directly from there, rather than theie web site. I don’t have one to try it.

Over the past two years, TfL have been ‘improving’ the North Circular Road at Bounds Green. About time. It was terrible for pretty much every road user; there have been plans to get this done for decades, and houses along the route had been compulsarily purchased and boarded up years ago.

Now it’s all ‘finished’, and we’re left with mostly dual carriageway throughout, but still with plenty of traffic lights, we’ve now got an attempt at a cycleway along the north side of the road - the sort that peters out at every bus stop, and doesn’t get priority over even the smallest side road.

We’ve still got the horrific traffic jams eastbound through the tunnels on Pinkham Way.

I’ve done an initial pass at remapping the area, with cycleway and crossings done. I think I’ve done all the blocked off roads and turn restrictions too.

At the weekend, I got on my bike, and cycled from London to Oxford. Take a look at a map, and there's a road that starts in London, and goes to Oxford. It's the A40.

Since the M40 was built, much of the A40, certainly from Denham Roundabout to Wheatley has most of it's former traffic on the motorway. This makes it an excellent route for keen long-distance road cyclists.

However, from the Marylebone Flyover to White City, that stretch used to be the A40(M), an urban motorway. Nowadays, it's just the A40, not a motorway any more. Being an intrepid cyclist, I set out to see if it could be cycled along. Technically, and legally, the answer is yes. There are no signs along there saying you can't cycle (or walk, or ride a horse) along the elevated sections.

However, the Marylebone flyover doesn't have a hard-shoulder, nor does the White city flyover. Technically, even cyclists shouldn't be cycling on the hard shoulder, but I doubt that police would stop a cyclist for that.

The speed limit along much of the Westway is currently 40mph, which doesn't make it any worse than cycling along the North Circular Road.

The only other cycle-hostile parts of the route were from Uxbridge roundabout to Denham Roundabout. Though technically legal to cycle the A40 there, there's a sign saying 'Unsuitable for cyclists'. Quite true. Fast moving traffic, a 70mph speed limit, and no hard shoulder.

This leads me to ponder if cycle route planners might want to have a tag for roads that, while technically legal, are termed hostile, and not recommended for novice cyclists eg. bicycle=hostile, or whether this could be implied by the speed limit and other factors?

I've just removed bicycle=no from the Westway, because it was untrue from a technical and legal standpoint. Suggestions welcome from anyone involved in cycle routing using OSM data.

Yesterday, I was cycling along the Old Bailey - not my usual route to work, and noticed a lack of something.

A whole block had been razed to the ground by developers in some redevelopment scheme.

While I was editing Openstreetmap to reflect the new state of reality, I felt like a vandal. All those POIs relfecting all the businesses along that block that had been carefully mapped by other mappers were deleted, a service road deleted. In it's place now lies a bit landuse=construction.

According to ITOWorld's OS Locator vs OSM comparison, the whole of Wales is now above 95% coverage of street names.

This means that their map of Wales is now as blue as David Cameron's fantasy election nights.

Now to fix Scotland and England, and then hopefully there's sufficient data released by OSNI to do Northern Ireland.

I noticed after Cyclestreets directed me and my bicycle down the new tunnel that something was afoot. Someone has updated the Hindhead tunnel as being open, which according to the Highways Agency, it isn't quite.

Anyhow, it's motor vehicles only; so I updated the tags. I wasn't going to roll back the opening of the tunnel in the data yet, since it's due to open next week anyway. I also put in the slip roads to the northeast of the Hazel Grove intersection, but they really need to be traced properly from GPS. I'll get that done next time I'm in the area.

Still to be done: GPS survey the new cycle tracks in the area that the Highways Agency have put in.

Shaun McDonald's rather useful Bike Shop Locator has reached a milestone. I've just got the count of unmatched bike shops down to 2000. Still a long way to go, and it really does need people with local knowledge, as some of the shops listed have since closed, or changed names, moved premises and so on.

If you know of bike shops near you, pop along to the locator tool and check that it looks right in OSM.

http://shaunmcdonald.dev.openstreetmap.org/bike-shop-locator/

It seems that work is afoot, and we are starting to see streetworks taking place to place the docking stations for the London Cycle Hire Scheme.

There is a list of locations where TfL have planning permission for the sites available, (see http://cyclehireapp.com ), but it seems that some of them aren't quite in the place given, and it's entirely possible that many of these won't be ready for the start of the scheme.

I've been using the data there to go and survey to find if the streetworks have started, and if there is evidence on the ground of actual docking stations under construction.

Recently, part of the new road for the A3 at Hindhead (south of Hazel Grove interchange) opened to traffic. There's a number of new roads, and roads being renamed. Currently I've edited openstreetmap to reflect what I saw on the ground in the past few days, and it should still permit sensible routing.

Highways Agency are hoping to have finished all the works south of Hazel Grove soon, so it'll need adjusting again soon.

So there I was on my way to the climbing wall, when I noticed lots of people with hi-vis jackets with "Marshall" on. Thought it must have been a cycle route, a road running race or something similar. Turns out it was people directing through traffic in the other directions onto a newly opened through road, to ease congestion on the Hornsey Park Road round the back of the shopping centre at Wood Green.

Of course, I had to investigate it on the way back. Turns out that I was beaten to mapping it by someone else, but I did upgrade it from highway=unclassified to highway=tertiary, since on my logic:

It has a central lane dividing markings, allowing for decent two-way traffic.
It is advertised as a through route.

It's actually quite a good through route, though it starts of pretty windy through an industrial estate on the southern end. I'll definitely be using it again if I'm driving.

I guess I could go and ask Haringey council if it really is a C-road, but they might not know. In writing this entry, I've just realised that there appears to be different spellings of the borough. Harringay, or Haringey? Which is it? The council don't seem to know. There's conflicting spelling on their own web site. Transport for London call it Harringay,

After a week-long holiday in the Frankfurt-am-Main area, I find that I only managed to add a single point of interest to the map, one pedestrian subway, and add one tag to another point of interest, because pretty much everything else had been done in the area.

(Admittedly, I didn't go house number mapping, or out of my way to do any mapping)

I also worked out that GPS receivers don't work on the ICE3 trains (or Eurostar), and you can only get intermittent coverage on the S-Bahn trains in the area.

Well, after hearing about this ride last year, I decided on doing it this year, since I didn't have a good enough excuse not to. It's a 200km semi-organised ride (turn up and go, if you want, pay up-front for a ride home if you need one) from London to the Dunwich, on the Suffolk Coast.

I didn't really intend to get much mapping done because

a) It's a very long ride
b) It's a night-time ride. Leave at 9pm, ride through the setting sun, watch it rise again, and arrive at the beach in the morning.

It's difficult to map under such circumstances. However, I did get a pretty full GPS trace of the ride, which has been uploaded, and I've marked off the few stopping points that I remembered.

With my local area practically complete, I thought I'd take some time to investigate new housing developments in the area.

There's some old barracks in Mill Hill that are being redeveloped. It's now being rebuilt into lots of 1 or two bedroom apartments, with new street layouts. It looks like some of the apartments have been sold, and people have moved in. Ah, the joys of living on a building site. It's a lovely location, I may like to live there myself if they had proper family houses there.

Once again, it seems that Openstreetmap is now ahead of all the commercial mappers. I surveyed the new road layout that has been completed to date. I may go back and take some photos to help do some building layouts of the blocks (would be a lot easier with an aerial photo).

The Hammer Lane underpass, part of the Hindhead tunnel scheme on the A3 in Hampshire is now open, took GPS trace as I drove around it, as is part of the Hazel Grove junction - the roundabout part of it anyway.

Adjusted road layouts according to my experience this evening.

I've just returned from a place where the streets really do have no name; nor do most of the houses. They don't have postcodes either. That place is County Galway, Ireland.

I have no idea how the post office / taxi / delivery drivers / ambulance / police / fire brigades function where the best you have to go on is a name, and the nearest village.

Actually, taxi drivers ask for directions, and frequently will call up the destination on the phone and ask for directions.

Anyway, since a large OSM contingient seems to be converging on the west of Ireland, I'm sure there will be a quick debate on how to tag the fact that a residential street really does have no name, something better than name=none

Having been working on a council list of rubbish collection days (which should be a fairly complete list of street names), I've concluded that EN5 (Barnet) is now complete. The last few streets were surveyed just as the sun was setting last night. Openstreetmap now includes Elwood Close, which doesn't appear on any other map that I've found, and was found to be accessed through an alleyway underneath a building, and not at all obvious from aerial photography, or even street signs. I have a feeling that it's not even an council adopted street (lacking a standard street sign, or even a proper access from the road).

It was kind of fun doing the detective work, and asking people on the street where they think these streets might be, and finally crossing them off my list of streets to map.

Of course, there's always lots of micromapping to do, and keeping an eye on council street naming and numbering committee minutes to keep on top of the area.

It was a pleasant evening last night, so I went out to attempt to map some of the London Cycle Network.

It doesn't help that I live in Barnet. London Borough of Barnet have quietly been sitting on a budget provided by Transport for London for cycle facilities and doing almost nothing. As such, what cycle routes that exist in the borough have either had their signs removed, or lane markings removed, or lane markings worn out over time, and fingerposts have been rotated.

To make things worse, the official maps available from Transport for London direct cyclists down many footpaths that are clearly signposted "no cycling", and any route numbers or other designations appear to have been changing, undocumented, unsignposted, or just plain wrong over time.

So here's a question to anyone else mapping the London Cycle Network : have you cross-checked the numbers on the signposts with the 'official' post-2007 maps?

Went for a bike ride, mostly along NCN12, and have managed to join up the Sustrans National Cycle Network routes 12 and 61 where there was a gap on the map between Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City.

When it's also a one-way street.

In reality, Popes Drive is a one-way street, but it has two exits.

After a 64km bike ride at the weekend, trying to find somewhere new near my home to map, the sum total of my efforts is about 2km of fresh tracks, and a few new points of interest. I think that next time, I shall have to plan my route to try to take in some more white space on the openstreetmap maps, and try to aim for streets that are mapped (due to the aerial imagery), but not named yet.

It was also the first long ride out with a Nokia N95 doing the logging. The phone is good enough, but the battery life isn't enough for a 3.5 hour session of tracklogs, continuous music playing, and lots of geotagged photos. I have got a Freeloader solar charger, which managed to keep enough juice flowing when the phone battery was running low. It would be interesting to note how much longer the Nokia battery lasts when not playing MP3s. I'll have a few more long runs before the London to Brighton ride.

Looking at the tracklogs from the Nokia (the phone was just in my pocket), I can easily see when I reached to get it out of my pocket, because the fix wobbles around lots. According to the documentation with the phone, it gets it's best fix with the phone slider open; so maybe I need to work out some sort of handlebar mount. Getting nice clean tracklogs is less important where the areas are already mostly mapped, and you're just taking geotagged photos; so it's probably not that important for the London to Brighton run, the main route of which got mapped last year.