[Openstreetmap] UK Motorways 100% Complete

[Lars Aronsson]

Etienne Cherdlu wrote:

> I'm pleased to announce that the main carriageways of all mainland UK
> motorways have been completed.  Over 3,000 km of roadway.

According to Wikipedia, the U.K. (including Northern Ireland, I 
suppose) has 3610 km of motorways.  I was surprised to find that 
it wasn't more.  Spain has 9910 km, France has 10220 km, and the 
tiny Netherlands has 2520 km.

Do you also aim to cover all motorway exits?  I found that driving 
Linköping-Stockholm (200 km of motorway) took 3 hours instead of 
the usual 2 hours when I was trying to exit and reenter at every 
motorway exit.  :-)  Sweden has 1589 km of motorway and I guess 
OSM has covered less than one third of that.  That number also 
happens to be the length of the country from north to south, an 
observation that led me to the following reflexion:

Dividing a country's area with the length of its motorways will 
give a distance (sq.km / km = km) between equally spaced motorways 
laid out as stripes over the surface.  In such a landscape, you 
would have to walk more than twice as long in Britain before you 
stumble across a motorway than in Germany, five times longer in 
Poland than in the Czech Republic, and eight times longer in 
Norway than in Sweden:

                     Area     Motorways    Spacing
                     sq.km      km           km
    Czech Republic    78866      558        141
    Denmark           43094     1010         43
    Finland          338145      650        520
    France           547030    10220         54
    Germany          356974    12040         30
    Netherlands       41526     2520         16
    Norway           385199      170       2265
    Poland           312685      400        781
    Spain            504782     9910         51
    Sweden           449964     1589        283
    U.K.             244101     3610         68

If you divide motorway kilometres by population, you will find 
very low numbers for Norway and Poland.  In Norway's case this can 
be explained by the mountainous geography, but in Poland it seems 
to be a national policy to build other kinds of roads.  The 
smaller, less populated, more mountainous and equally ex-Eastern 
block Czech Republic has more motorways than Poland.

Can we add kilometres of roadway (sum of length of line segments) 
to the Stats page on the wiki?  This would count motorways twice 
(both carriageways), but I could live with that.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se