[OSM-talk] UK bike map standard: Cheltenham pattern becoming more objective

[Andy Allan]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Andrew Chadwick (email lists)
<andrewc-email-lists at piffle.org> wrote:
> What do people think of the latest iteration of
>
>  http://www.cyclenation.org.uk/resources/mapping.php
>  (formerly http://www.cyclecheltenham.org.uk/map_standard.html )?
>
> We should probably get our oar in here and try to make the standard
> base-map-neutral and colour-scheme-neutral. I shall have a word with
> their feedback person, methinks; any other points I should be making?

[...snip...]

I very much agree with all your points - the more objective the
better, but the OSM slant on this is how crowd-sourceable the
objective data is. Motor vehicle speed and traffic volume levels are
the especially hard ones - the latter generally needing huge amounts
of work spread over a few (long) days to get reasonable measurements.
Now if only Local Authorities would put their survey data into the
public domain...

Likewise with the colour scheme - it's abysmal. It's not a linear
scheme by any property of the colours - it's not even like the more
saturated the colour the better/worse the route, or consecutive
colours of the rainbow or anything. If we correctly classify all the
roads in the UK I can guarantee that opencyclemap.org won't ever use
those colours :-P

My final point would be the selective arguments they are using to
'dis' route-based designs. The comparison between different types is a
'good' Cheltenham style map versus a poor route map. Grrr. And I still
go for a large-tent approach to cycle maps - there's a place for route
mapping as well as network mapping - and definitely a place for poor
routes being improved rather than ignored.

So I'd say:
1) Avoid the colour scheme
2) Question the crowd-sourcing-ness of some of the data, and work out
how volunteers could do it without expert support
3) Use a nit-comb to remove all the OS and Google mentions from the
proposed standard.

Cheers,
Andy