[OSM-talk] Cycle route planning using OSM

[Richard Fairhurst]

Tom Chance wrote:

> There should probably be a separate project for cyclists and   
> pedestrians, a kind of "OSM for humans" :-) Freemap is making good   
> progress in producing a slippy map for countryside walks. It will   
> really need a different approach to rendering, showing different   
> data, and different tools to make it easy for people to enter the   
> data specific to this project. Use the same database, of course, or   
> at least use the OSM database and only store additional data   
> separately.

<aol>me too</aol>

One of the reasons I'm involved in OSM is that I think the National  
Cycle Network is a thoroughly great invention - both fun and socially  
useful. But the online maps on Sustrans' website are, I'm afraid,  
pretty much unusable, and that can't but hurt take-up of the NCN. A  
usable map of the NCN would help to encourage cycling and discourage  
car use.

So, one day it would be excellent to have an "Outdoor map" style of  
cartography offered on the main OSM slippy map, as a third alternative  
to Mapnik (which is evolving along the lines of road-atlas/streetmap  
cartography) and Osmarender. Freemap may well be a good starting point.

With that and a route-planner, there would seem to me to be one  
element remaining: a printable route-guide. In a previous existence I  
did http://www.waterscape.com/boating/guides/ , which creates dynamic  
printable PDF cruising guides. This was using OS data for canals, but  
there's no reason why the same couldn't be done with OSM data for  
cycle routes.

As for the editor, after a suggestion from Nick W I put walking and  
cycling tag presets in Potlatch, but that's only 1% of what could be  
done...

cheers
Richard