[Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot

[Matt Amos]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 12:36 PM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
> There are tons of things. People drive in the US so pubs are difficult to arrange things around. Mapping in the US is boring because of the big gridded cities. I map much less in the US than the UK. It's not just that there are roads there already, which by the way is a good thing because I have sat for hours correcting them against aerial.
>
> It's just not that simple to say imports killed it.

some interesting facts:

http://matt.dev.openstreetmap.org/editors_urban_per_month.png
http://matt.dev.openstreetmap.org/editor_growth_comparison.png

when the AND import ran (around sep '07), it seems the NL community
was already about an order of magnitude larger than the US community
when the TIGER import ran (roughly sep '07 - feb '08). in the
comparison, with fewer countries but the time base adjusted so that
they all hit 1 user per month per million urban population at the same
time, it's pretty clear to see that the UK, NL and RU communities seem
to be carving roughly the same path. the germans grew much faster over
their first 3 years than other communities.

the US is difficult to interpret. one view is that it grew at
approximately the same rate as UK, NL and RU until about 1.5 years in,
where it plateaus. that's late 2009, when there was lots of TIGER
fixup activity and some big mapping parties (e.g: Atlanta). the
alternative view is that the growth rate is actually smaller, but that
there's a temporary peak mid-late 2009 which masks that.

given that these numbers are normalised to the *urban* population,
population density issues don't come into it - we're basically looking
at cities. and given that AT and RU have a much lower proportion of
their populations in urban areas than the US. Canada has about the
same urbanisation as the US, and similar gridded cities, and similar
attitudes to driving [1], but a growth curve the same as France or
Spain.

this doesn't tell us what the cause of slow community growth in the US
is, but it does tell us that it isn't population density, it isn't
driving attitudes and it isn't the interestingness (or not) of the
road layout.

cheers,

matt

[1] 77% of Canadians use public transport "a few times a year" or
less, compared with 88% of those in the US, 48% in the UK and 13% in
Russia, according to
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/natgeo_surveys_countries_trans.html