Stephen Gower wrote: > On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 02:45:27PM +0100, Andrew Chadwick (email lists) wrote: >> Out of the blue, I've been asked to advise Cyclox, a local cyclists' >> advocacy group about improving [upon] the Oxfordshire County Council's >> cycle map for the city of Oxford[1], and I've said I'll help out. > > That's great - there's been some discussion of this on the Cyclox mailing > list (for example at http://tinyurl.com/cycloxmap AKA > http://groups.google.co.uk/group/cyclox-forum/browse_thread/thread/a237464df3618a56# > ) > > It's worth noting there's conflicting interests behind the supporting > groups: > * Oxford University (whose representative is actually who has contacted you, > not a Cyclox person at all) will want something that is suitable for Staff > and Students - so College and Department names will need to be clear, for > example
Department- and college-specific bike parking was mentioned, IIRC. Doable from our perspective (access=private//operator=Univ. of Ox.). A paper map with all college and department names nice and clear could be drawn using exported SVG, and any labels that don't look right or that got dropped by mapnik could be restored by the designer. > * Oxfordshire County Council will want something that highlights all the > cycle facilities they've invested in, whether or not the facilities are > actually useful to cyclists I've actually thought about that already, and it highlights the weaknesses of our current way of doing on-road cycle lanes and roadside tracks. There's a thread in talk-gb about it right now. Cycle parking we can cover and store in OSM. Similarly bike lanes once we get our act sorted out. 20MPH zones can be done too, and can be extended later on (there's a local plan to do just that, last I looked). What else? > * Cyclox will want something that is useful to their membership, who are > actual cyclists from all walks of life in Oxford. This sounds great until > you start listening to Cyclox member opinions (see that post refered to > above for example) when you find there's a subtle conflict with... > * OSM who only want facts in the database, not subjective opinions. Yes - as I mentioned, there'll have to be some human input to this, and I suspect that's where the variance between OSM objective and Cyclox subjective extras ought to happen. > I'm not sure what would go into making a really useful local cycling map, > but I think at some point it's going to need some subjective tagging. When > this has cropped up before some people have said we just need to add lots of > factual tags and the rest can be calculated from that. This is good theory, > but imagine how hard it would be to render the current map if instead of > highway=motorway we instead had car=yes, lanes=3, oneway=yes, > hard_shoulder=yes, foot=no, bicycle=no, horse=no, learner_driver=no, etc! > > highway=motorway is great for a traditional road map, because the > classification of roads for motorvehicles by officialdom is generally quite > sensible. Sadly the same is not true of classification for cycling. Up to a point, you -can- infer how easy it is to use a bike in a given area from how easily and speedily a car can be driven. Though the precise factors are more often synergistic for level-3 cyclists and more often antagonistic for level-1 cyclists. Once you go beyond that point, we can start tagging for an external standard, like the Cheltenham one. If you make the first stab by automating the way a Cheltenham rating is calculated, then you can do a comparison and see where it differs from peoples' personal opinions. Then incorporate the differences back into the data as an override tag. This is fine in this mapper's (highly subjective) opinion because after all we're working against an externally-defined standard. >> (I really like the look of the so-called "Cheltenham Standard", >> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Cheltenham_Standard , which >> RichardF dredged up a while back on #osm. I wonder how/if that could be >> implemented in a Mapnik ruleset...) > > What goes around comes around - I *believe* Richard came across the > Cheltenham Standard after it was posted on an earlier Cyclox thread about > creating an Oxford map, and I mentioned it here: > > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-August/028438.html > > I like the Cheltenham Standard, and think tags based on it would make a fine > basis for a local cycle map. I'd probably not use the colours they've > suggested, but that seems to be the first comment from everyone who sees it. > I particularly like the healthy disregard it has for official cycle > facilities - cycle lanes/etc are simply taken into account when assessing > the level of any road, rather than being depicted on the map themselves. > > The problem is, and remains, the subjectivity - we can probably get good > agreement in and around Oxford on what roads are what level, but if someone > else tries to tag somewhere else, they might have a different baseline. The > stuff you've added to the "discussion" page of the wiki page you refer to > above is a good start to helping everyone use the same baseline, so lets > keep working in that direction! Throw your ideas on the pile, people: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Talk:Cheltenham_Standard I'm just one person; we need more input still. Shared baselines are good. -- Andrew Chadwick _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
