Shaun McDonald's Blog

At the start of October I took a week’s holiday up north in Dumfries in the run up to the Dumfries Mapping Party. It was a great week of mostly cycling, sightseeing and ended with a mapping party, held in the local leisure centre, DG One, which has some council meeting rooms.

Heading out I was waiting on the Royal Mail delivering some OpenStreetMap reflective vests, which were supposed to have been delivered a few days earlier, though unreliable mail delivery is one downside of strike action. It meant that I had to delay my departure from home, thankfully I had bought the flexible train tickets from London to Dumfries, rather than the advance fares where you can’t change the train your travelling on and were only a couple of pounds cheaper when I was purchasing my tickets.

The original trains that I had planned to get had a short, reasonable delay between them, however the train I ended up getting from London meant that there was over an hour wait in Carlisle. I couldn’t be bothered waiting, so I decided to set off towards Dumfries following the National Cycle Network Route 7, which at the time was only mapped to the edge of Carlisle. When I crossed the border, I checked the train times from Gretna Green on my phone and realised that the train that I would have got from Carlisle was due in about the time it would take me to get to the station. Sure enough I had a minute or two to wait on the platform before the train (with space for six bike at one end of the train, yeah ScotRail do know how to transport bikes unlike some other train companies I can think of) appeared. Later on in the week I completed the rest of the NCN7 from South of Dumfries to Gretna Green which hadn’t already been added to OpenStreetMap.

Cycle track from my week in Dumfries

I’ve had a little play with the Party Render scripts to produce the lovely image on the left. I customised the place names that were shown a bit to make it clearer.

On the Wednesday meeting up with the local OSM contact (who goes by the name disgruntled, or known in the real world as Sally) for the first time at the Wednesday Wheelers meetup. It was quite interesting to see and hear the older generation happily cycling 10-30 miles for their regular weekly meetup. I felt quite at home considering my normal commute (well at the time) was 8-10 miles in each direction, and most people I speak to are surprised at the distance I cycle each day.

Then on the Thursday I took a rather long ride over the hills of Ae and added the lcn 10 from Dumfries to Moffat. Sally had already mapped the first section of the route, which was a really nice cycle track, which had been converted from an old railway line. It was fairly flat until I got to Ae, where there is the Forest of Ae mountain bike trails, with some really steep hills that I wasn’t expecting. Thankfully just before the climb, and in time for a late lunch there was a nice little cafe, with a bike shop in the same building. Heading over the hills there were some really pretty views. It was also nice being in the middle of nowhere and only being able to hear some birdsong, and the light breeze in the trees. Once I hit the downhill, I found it pretty scary, as I wasn’t used to going down such a long hill with that style of track and occasional cattle grids.

On my return I took an earlier, but late running, train to Carlisle and cycled round Carlisle to get a bunch of it mapped.

I was really impressed with the way that Sally had managed to write and get published an article in the local paper. She’s also been a great local contact and mapper. Dumfries council organised the nice venue, with the event being part of the Smarter Choices, Smarter Places programme in Scotland.

I’ve been uploading the photos I’ve taken to Flickr in various sets. Then importing them into CycleStreets, so that they will appear in the route listings when you plan a route in the Dumfires area.

Even in this day and age, the roads the general public cycle on are riddled with potholes, speed humps falling over themselves, or general unevenness around man hole covers and drains. I’m fed up with having to look at the road in front of me for these bicycle damaging unevenness and potholes instead of at the surrounding traffic, which to be honest is more important.

There is already a service in the UK for reporting these defects to the local council, called FixMyStreet. There is even have an iPhone app for reporting problems while on the ground. However I felt that not enough people knew about FixMyStreet, and even fewer were reporting problems. So I decided to come up with a way to automate these reports to the local councils even further.

I believed that these uneven roads could be crowd sourced through recording a GPS track, and a storage of seismograph by using the accelerometer in the iPhone or iPod Touch. These tracks are merged together and tied to the road network automagically, now that there are enough tracks in the system, analysis is running constantly to find places where many people regularly have a high vibration, when flying over a speed hump, or just about halted as though you have hit the kerb straight on by finding a conspicuous pot hole in the middle of a bus lane, about one bus length away from a sunken drain.

Some of the crowd sourcing community have taken this a step further and provide a video stream of the whole cycle ride, which again is synced up with the GPS trace, and used as evidence of poor quality road surface. The whole sync process is done automagically after you upload. It is even more accurate if you up load a photo of the time on the GPS and the seismometer.

OpenStreetMap is now using this data to enter all the traffic calming, in a few months time the Crap-O-Surface Detector service will start automatically suggesting places where there are speed humps, and giving the appropriate, err smoothness tag* for every road.

CycleStreets have found the data to be so good, that they have decided to postpone implementing traffic lights, specific routes, fixing the OSM to Cycle Streets types, and of course hill avoidance, in favour of using the data from the Crap-O-Surface Detector service. Don’t worry, all the other items are still on the todo list.

So I’m please to announce that the Crap-O-Surface Detector is now out of the private pre-Alpha, and today entering the Beta stage in the software cycle, please head over to Crap-O-SurfaceDetector.com to see how you can participate, while watching more roadworks in the places that really, really need them. Once the roadworks are gone, you should (if the council contractor has been doing their job properly) see a marked improvement in the road surface.

With the extra eating over Christmas, I’ve started out on my (evening) cycling again. On the 1st of January I headed out East and got to Rochester before getting on the train home. On the way near to Ebbsfleet International I found a rather interesting sign that I just had to take a picture of.

After uploading it to Flickr, I check that I had geocoded it right, by looking at the map on Yahoo. I got very confused. It seems that Flickr need to start using OpenStreetMap data for London. Yahoo don’t that the new Channel Tunnel Rail link and some of the new roads around Ebbsfleet International, though they do have the location of Ebbsfleet International. Compare Yahoo with OpenStreetMap.

UPDATE: Looking further it seems that Flickr are using older map tiles compared to Yahoo.com, but appear to be the same tiles as used in Yahoo UK. 

END UPDATE

On the way I was testing out some routing using osm data, and found a few data bugs. One very important one being a primary road that goes through a tunnel, which doesn’t allow cyclist, pedestrians, nor horse drawn carriages, hence routing cyclists through it shouldn’t be done.

On the 2nd day of the year, I took the train down to Caterham, which is just inside the M25, and then cycled back up mostly using the NCN21. On passing through New Addington, I got a little mapping done on the way, mostly new roads that are completely missing from OSM, there is a lot of mapping required down there. Anyone up for a mapping party?

On Saturday 27 September I done a day trip to Bradford for an OpenStreetMap mapping party. It was almost 5 hours of travel in each direction, but was worth having some face to face discussion with some of the other mappers and developers. I mapped most of sector 6, with the exception of the South Western edge.

I wished I could have stayed longer at the pub after the mapping, as there was some interesting discussion about the state of the OpenStreetMap project.

There is an excellent animation of where the mappers were.

Last weekend (22-25 August) I went over to Dublin for the Dragheda Mapping Party. I took the train and ferry over, instead of flying, so that I could take my bike. I did get some coding and catching up done on the train and ferry. I found it interesting that Virgin Trains run electric to Crewe, then attach a diesel locomotive on the front to continue into Holyhead. I also found that Virgin Trains now have “enhanced mobile reception” on their trains. I did have to give up trying to use the GPS as Virgins don’t have enhanced gps reception.

I was staying in Dublin and travelling up to Dragheda each day. There has been some considerable progress in the area over the weekend, going from only the main roads mapped to most of the town being mapped by the end of the weekend.

There was some pre-event publicity in a local paper. However the original press release that went out somehow got completely mis-interpreted.

On the Saturday there was a lot of overlap between the mappers, so we got all the traces and photos loaded on to Dermot McNally’s Mac, and done the editing all at once. It prevented people adding the same roads multiple times.

On the Sunday morning I was picked up by Dermot and we done some car mapping on the way to the venue. At one point we had to get out and hold the vegetation back so that we could take a picture of the street sign.

On the way back I hit the start of the 17 day closure of the west coast mainline for rail works, so had to change trains and get lost going from Birmingham New Street to Birmingham Moor Street. I did manage to get a trace all the way back, and map a few streets in Holyhead. Probably should have stayed in Holyhead to do some more mapping and take a later train.

Just a quick review of the Leeds Mapping party last week (16th and 17th August), and the Leeds Bar Camp that it was part of. In a few weeks, I’ll do a nonames animation to show the progress over the previous few weeks, similar to what I done for my State of the Map 2008 presentation. It takes a few weeks for everyone to enter the data (I’ve not had time yet), and for it to show up in the weekly planet file. I also want to show the effect of the aftermath.

On the Saturday, it was a BarCamp day. I had various people ask varying questions about OpenStreetMap from the those who didn’t know anything about OSM, to why doesn’t OSM have altitude data. By the end of the day, anyone there should know what OpenStreetMap is. There was many people who were saying that they would have come to the mapping party the following day, but they only had time to be at BarCamp for the one day.

I went to various interesting presentations/discussions and learned some useful things, such as how simple it is to create an iPhone app, though I don’t know if the sample code used was posted somewhere (if that’s allowed under NDA). At the end of the day we all went to the pub across the road for drinks.

On Sunday, there was one stream specifically for OpenStreetMap. We started off at 11am with a mixed group of newbies, and experienced mappers, where I gave a introductory presentation on openstreetmap. The interesting thing about having the 3 other experienced mappers there too, was that they were able to share their techniques too. This usually means that the other mappers learn some keyboard shortcut, or how to do photo mapping, for example.

Before lunch we went out as a 2 groups to do some group mapping. In some places we would split off to map a series of foot paths or the outlines of playgrounds, and then come back together again. We went back to Old Broadcasting House for lunch, and to teach the newbies how to do photo mapping. Later in the afternoon there was some more mapping. By this time my GPS had decided it wanted to kiss the floor once too often, so was no longer working. Instead of going out mapping with the rest of the mappers, I stayed behind to talk to some of the other bar camp folk a bit more about osm and play warewolf for the first and possibly last time.

Overall most of the crowd that were there, were excited about OpenStreetMap and its potential. We should now have some more mappers in the North England. In the future, I’ll try and get to some more BarCamps.

With the news that Apple has released the SDK for the iPhone, their developer site is currently unavailable. It seems to be have exceeded Apple’s expectations in terms of demand.

Further to my previous post about my bike. I had problems getting a proper chainring from half the bike shops in Edinburgh, so instead I got a second hand bike that was similar to my old one. 

The overall cycle was tough. First I headed out East from Edinburgh through Musselburgh on to the A199, out to Dunbar. Parts of the A199 have some nice cycle lanes. As the road is fairly flat and straight you can easily get the speed up to do a nice sprint. This was the easy part of the route, as I have done it before.

 

At Dunbar I started to head south towards Berwick-Upon-Tweed. Parts of this part of the A1 can be scary, however it the only way south close to the coast that I know of. In the middle of the Borders, I decided to head through Pease Bay again. It is a steep road down to the bay, where the caravan park is, however it is even steeper on the other side heading out of the bay.

 

As I had the map in TrekBuddy, I was able to find the A1107, which joins the A1 with Eyemouth in a loop. This helped me to stay off the A1 for a lot longer than I did the last time. It was a nice road into Eyemouth, with some great views of the North Sea. From Eyemouth I headed along the “Berwickshire Coastal Route”, which meant that I was on the A1 for even less, and I’d have even more data to be able to add to OpenStreetMap.org.

At the border between Scotland and England, I took a snack and photo break.

From the Border, it is only a few miles more into Berwick, where I joined the National Cycle Network Route 1 to head back to Edinburgh.

The National Cycle Network takes you on the quietest roads possible. This will usually mean that they are quite hilly, longer and going into the middle of nowhere.  There were some points where you could just see fields or trees, but no lights apart from my own bike or the occasional car. As you are heading west along the National Cycle Network, it does zig zag between Scotland and England a few times. At one point there is a bridge that was built in 1820, and still in use today.

In Norham there was a sign that was rather confusing, as it had the wrong National Cycle Network Route number. Just as well I used the name of the city I wanted to head towards, rather than the route number.

Just before Galashiels, I stopped to check the GPS and found that the phone no longer seen it. Unfortunately the battery in the bluetooth GPS that I’m currently using only lasts for about 12 hours according to the manufacturer. It lasted about half an hour longer, than the manufacturer’s stated operating time, so should I be happy that I couldn’t get the last bit of the trip? The cold weather didn’t help either, as batteries tend to have a shorter life when they are cold. 

From there on, there was no point in me taking any more pictures as I wouldn’t be able to Geotag them. Also it was dark so it was difficult to take any decent pictures. Finally stopping to take pictures does slow my average speed down considerably, and I was wanting to get home rather than be on the bike for a whole 24 hours.

From Galashiels I just hit the A7 north to Edinburgh. I did notice on the way that the signs appeared to change from green to white like a yo-yo. Is it a trunk road or a primary road?

Total Distance was about 150 miles in 17 and three quarter hours. Next up on the longer distance cycling is to head round the Forth again.

Now I just need to get the tracks from yesterday added to OSM (amongst the numerous other things I need to do).

Photos on Flickr

Map of the cycle

Today I took part on the CTC Saturday cycle for the first time. Total distance including getting to and from the start and finish was 51 miles.

Yesterday I took part in the first Edinburgh 20 miler ride of 2008. It was an easy, slow paced, group ride of 12 people around the west of Edinburgh. In total for the day, including to and from the start/finish I cycled about 26 miles.