Thursday 28 August 2008

Round Berkshire Cycle Route



The changes I made to the mapping of the Round Berkshire Cycle Route have now been rendered, and pretty much the whole circuit can be seen on Open Street Map.
There are a couple of mistakes, where I tagged the route wrongly, and although I have now fixed them, it will be another week before the fixes appear on a new version of the map.
Also, I'm not really happy with the way that, after rendering, the local Round Berkshire route hides Sustrans regional route 52. This is no fault of the people who put all this together, who are doing a wonderful job. But I think the Sustrans route should receive precedence, so today I have slightly changed the way that I have tagged the Round Berkshire Route. The whole route is still in the underlying database, but (assuming I understand the rendering process) when the map is updated next week, where the Round Berkshire route follows a Sustrans route, the Sustrans route will be plotted, rather than the Round Berkshire Route.
Inevitably it's a bit of a compromise, but we'll see how it looks next week. There are a few alternative paths that I want to add next, and I haven't checked yet to see how much of this can be transferred to my GPS.
Meanwhile, I know that at least one visitor to Tlatet is riding parts of this route, so comments are welcome.


(The "official" map is here).

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like you've been doing a lot of cycling.

You should get your blog on the "Planet OSM" aggregation/feed. Drop Shaun McDonald an e-mail and I'm sure he'll add it.
osm@shaunmcdonald.me.uk
http://blogs.openstreetmap.org

gom1 said...

Thanks Gregory, and thanks for your work on Durham. My wife and I met at college in South Bailey in the early 70's, and we have many fond memories of those days.

I wonder when somebody will fix Sunderland (on OSM, not the city). It must be the least coverage of any major UK city. Unfortunately it's a bit too far from home for me now.

- said...

How exactly have you changed the data to fix the priority of rendering?

This bug was noted on the developer's blog, and it's on his todo list to fix (apparently should be a simple database ordering)

randomjunk said...

Hi, nice mapping!

Can I ask what the modification you made to try to get the RCN above the loop was?

The cyclemap isn't perfect when it comes to ordering things... sometimes it's fairly random, and sometimes it chooses LCN over RCN over NCN rather than the other way round. I'd rather fix the cyclemap than hack apart the data too much.

Anyway, it should work properly at higher zooms which are now available thanks to new hosting... http://www.opencyclemap.org/ if you missed the URL.

gom1 said...

National and regional routes are tagged ncn_ref or rcn_ref as appropriate. For the Round Berkshire route, I have used "lcn=yes" if it is not a Sustrans route. Because the name is too long for labels, I've not labelled the individual ways with a name.

Then I've put a relationship across all the individual components, with the name attached. On this version that was also tagged "lcn", but I've now removed that tag from the relationship.

I hope that what will happen in the rendering is that each piece of the way will be coloured acccording to the tags on the way.

The overall route will still be in the database, for some future use, but no longer with a "lcn" tag, so presumably not rendered.

I've not really changed the precedence, just made the overall route "invisible", while leaving individual components visible acording to what type of route they are.

Does this make sense, and have I understood it properly?

Is thee a better way?

gom1 said...

Thanks edgemaster - I didn't notice that this was regarded as a bug - I thought it was a feature.

Group51 said...

Bravo. I was wondering how I was going to cycle this route without getting lost this September. You to the rescue!

gom1 said...

Good luck with the ride this summer, and thanks for the comment Group51. I had intended to add some of the optional diversions, but as far as I can see they are not marked on the ground, so you will have to rely on the "official" map for those. Please feel free to fix any errors you discover on your way round. And enjoy the ride. The western part is particularly good. Pete