[OSM-talk] OpenCycleMap: outreach to local group and council: any HOWTOs or pointers? [Oxford and general content]

Stephen Gower socks-openstreetmap.org at earth.li
Tue Sep 30 17:32:02 BST 2008


On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 02:45:27PM +0100, Andrew Chadwick (email lists) wrote:
> Out of the blue, I've been asked to advise Cyclox, a local cyclists'
> advocacy group about improving [upon] the Oxfordshire County Council's
> cycle map for the city of Oxford[1], and I've said I'll help out.

That's great - there's been some discussion of this on the Cyclox mailing
list (for example at http://tinyurl.com/cycloxmap AKA
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/cyclox-forum/browse_thread/thread/a237464df3618a56# )

It's worth noting there's conflicting interests behind the supporting
groups:
* Oxford University (whose representative is actually who has contacted you,
not a Cyclox person at all) will want something that is suitable for Staff
and Students - so College and Department names will need to be clear, for
example
* Oxfordshire County Council will want something that highlights all the
cycle facilities they've invested in, whether or not the facilities are
actually useful to cyclists
* Cyclox will want something that is useful to their membership, who are
actual cyclists from all walks of life in Oxford. This sounds great until
you start listening to Cyclox member opinions (see that post refered to
above for example) when you find there's a subtle conflict with...
* OSM who only want facts in the database, not subjective opinions.

I'm not sure what would go into making a really useful local cycling map,
but I think at some point it's going to need some subjective tagging.  When
this has cropped up before some people have said we just need to add lots of
factual tags and the rest can be calculated from that. This is good theory,
but imagine how hard it would be to render the current map if instead of
highway=motorway we instead had car=yes, lanes=3, oneway=yes,
hard_shoulder=yes, foot=no, bicycle=no, horse=no, learner_driver=no, etc!

highway=motorway is great for a traditional road map, because the
classification of roads for motorvehicles by officialdom is generally quite
sensible. Sadly the same is not true of classification for cycling.

> (I really like the look of the so-called "Cheltenham Standard",
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Cheltenham_Standard , which
> RichardF dredged up a while back on #osm. I wonder how/if that could be
> implemented in a Mapnik ruleset...)

What goes around comes around - I *believe* Richard came across the
Cheltenham Standard after it was posted on an earlier Cyclox thread about
creating an Oxford map, and I mentioned it here:                                                            
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-August/028438.html

I like the Cheltenham Standard, and think tags based on it would make a fine
basis for a local cycle map.  I'd probably not use the colours they've
suggested, but that seems to be the first comment from everyone who sees it. 
I particularly like the healthy disregard it has for official cycle
facilities - cycle lanes/etc are simply taken into account when assessing
the level of any road, rather than being depicted on the map themselves.

The problem is, and remains, the subjectivity - we can probably get good
agreement in and around Oxford on what roads are what level, but if someone
else tries to tag somewhere else, they might have a different baseline.  The
stuff you've added to the "discussion" page of the wiki page you refer to
above is a good start to helping everyone use the same baseline, so lets
keep working in that direction!

s




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