[OSM-talk] UK metrics basis - How complete is your area?

[Andy Robinson (blackadder)]

Following on from Frederik's earlier snapshot statistics for Europe I
thought I'd work out a hopefully more reliable measure basis for the UK.
Hopefully it will help people evaluate their own areas to monitor progress.

The evaluation was done for the area of Sutton Coldfield and adjacent wards
running towards Birmingham. A total of 10 wards in all. This area I know is
completely mapped out. I ended up with the following data:

Population from ONS = 252,870
Occupied Households from ONS = 106,068
Total land area from ONS = 93914 (m2)(thousands)
Area of Road from ONS = 8976 (m2)(thousands)
Length of highways in OSM database = 836,035m (Anything lesser than
"service" was ignored)

So, the two main metrics I plan to use are:

Assuming average road width (from above) is 10.74m then the "Area of Road"
from ONS can be roughly transcribed to the total length of road for a given
area.

There is 3.306m of road per head of population.

Obviously these figures are only going to work in urban conurbations in the
UK, but hopefully they provide a basis from which to estimate progress.

I'll knock up a wiki page with how I went about all of this.

Cheers

Andy