[OSM-talk-ie] Newbie!

[Dermot McNally]

On 18/03/2008, Andrew McCarthy <me at andrewmccarthy.ie> wrote:

>  Side question: Does every public road have an "L...." number, or only
>  some?

My understanding is that all do (all that don't already have M, N or
R). There seems to be a policy, at least at individual county level,
to get the L-numbers onto signs. I did a marathon mapping session
yesterday and Cavan appear to be midway through their campaign,
Leitrim is well-advanced and Wexford have had them for a while.

For the reference of anybody that doesn't know, you should be tagging
these as ref=Lxxxx.

I've noticed that some L-numbers are 4-digit, others 5-digit.

> I noticed a while ago that there are some pretty small roads in
>  Wicklow that have very prominent signs indicating "L1234" or whatever.
>  And by prominent, I mean two poles per sign, one sign on each side of
>  the road entrance. If only the whole country had such thorough
>  signage...

NI named every road to facilitate postal deliveries, I think at the
same time postcodes were being introduced. This may have similar
motivation. Either way, it seems to be a Good Thing.

> Okay, I'll be driving one particular road twice tomorrow myself, so
>  between that and the existing map I'll have a pretty good idea what
>  should be kept and not. There are some multi-kilometre stretches which
>  are absolutely straight, as far as the eye can see.

As a followup - the JOSM plugin you want is utils 0.5 (or presumably
later). I've just had occasion to install it on a virgin machine and
its default "aggressiveness" seems fairly reasonable. From what I can
gather, a lot of the roads in your area needing cleanup are probably
ones that I originally mapped from other peoples' traces. At the time,
I did auto-clean them, but I'm forced to admit that a higher
aggressiveness level would have been better.

BTW, be careful in deleting nodes that you don't delete any carrying
tags that are needed for another purpose. I think the simplify
function is smart enough not to splat anything with tags.

Cheers,
Dermot