Tlatet

Shops that aren't

2012-01-26T21:30:00.004Z

Sometimes OSM contributors mark a high street business as an "office" rather than a "shop". There is logic in this. Accountants, employment agencies, travel agents, and solicitors are delivering a service rather than offering goods for sale, and they are normally sat at desks rather than behind a counter or a till. But the boundaries between the two can become blurred.

For a number of professions both keys: "shop" and "office" are fairly widely used in the UK.

The chart shows the mix of "shop" and "office" for some of the more common professions on the high street. Each of the labels shows common variants (after the most widespread term).

There seems to be some consensus among contributors that most accountants, employment agents and travel agents work in offices, while most estate agents work in shops. Opinion is more evenly divided when it comes to solicitors and insurance brokers.

The mix of singular and plural forms (solicitor / solicitors) is a bit of a nuisance, but apart from that I've only got a couple of quibbles. To me, saying that a funeral director operates from a shop feels even more odd than saying that they operate from an office (I seem to be in a minority here). And in my understanding "financial services" covers very broad scope. Describing a financial adviser as offering financial services doesn't convey their role very precisely. Unfortunately that's how many of them characterise themselves. So dissent here is likely to prove fruitless.

Personally, I feel pretty comfortable with the other different combinations. For members of the legal profession who deal directly with the public I like to see the term "solicitor" rather than "lawyer" as it is in line with normal UK terminology. And using a mix of "shop" and "office" keys seems both reasonable and manageable.

New GPS

2012-01-22T14:16:00.000Z

I first got a GPS for the bike back in 2008. Astonishingly that was nearly four years ago. It was a Garmin Edge, and I used it to collect traces for Open Street Map, time my rides, and for occasional route finding. A couple of posts here about putting the OSM Cycle Map on a Garmin Edge have generated as much traffic as almost anything else I've written, and I had a bit of an exchange with Wired Magazine when they illustrated an article on OSM cycle maps with one of my pictures, despite the license conditions.

So we have had some interesting journeys together, but my old Garmin Edge packed up towards the end of last year. I've been using various apps on a Smartphone since, but now I've been treated to a proper replacement - a new Garmin Edge 800.

Things have clearly moved on in the last four years, and this new GPS is lighter, easier to read, with a better mount. The touch screen is a big advantage, and unlike the smartphone, I can use that while wearing gloves.

It didn't come with anything other than a minimal base map, and I obviously wanted to take the OSM cycle map with me. I had generated a copy of this a year ago for the old Garmin. To get started quickly I transferred the memory card across, and found that it still worked up to a point, but minor roads were invisible.

I couldn't find an up-to-date, ready-made version of the OSM cycle map for a Garmin, so again I set out to build my own. The tools in this area have also moved on since I last did this. It has taken quite a bit of fiddling around to make a new version of the cycle map, and so far I have only partly succeeded. I'm still struggling with minor roads, and the sea is missing (which matters more round here than it did in Berkshire).

If I forget about special styling for the the cycle stuff, and just opt for the standard map format, then things are a bit easier. I can generate a nice basic map with a considerable amount of detail, and lots of POIs. As best I can tell, route finding has improved, though it's difficult to know whether to credit the map or the device for that. With the standard format I get to see the sea, as well as minor roads.

That will do me for the time being, but this is an itch that needs to be scratched. I can see that I'm in for a bit of fiddling with mkgmap styles over the next few days (unless anyone has a better suggestion).

Impersonating a police officer

2012-01-20T19:44:00.001Z

Today's destination on the bike was this odd structure, which is called Ratcheugh Observatory. It isn't an observatory in the same sense as the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, or Jodrell Bank.

It was commissioned by the 1st Duke of Northumberland, and designed by Robert Adam towards the end of the 18th century. The room on pillars allowed the Duke to observe his lands (or at least part of them). It was one of a number of monuments that he built in memory of his wife (who died in 1776) at their favourite picnic spots. That seems rather sweet, but their favourite picnic spots mostly seem to have been in places where they could admire the extent of the properties they owned.

This was also my first chance to try out my new GPS, but more of this later.

It was a nice ride, and good to get out, but it was a bit of a grey day. So I was wearing a bright yellow, high visibility jacket. On my way home, I passed a police station, and a toddler in a buggy yelled out "look mummy, there's my daddy". It was all a bit like Jenny Agutter in the Railway Children. I don't think I've ever been mistaken for a policeman before. Thankfully, the mother had better eyesight.

Tagging of shops

2012-01-20T10:20:00.004Z

One of the challenges in adding various different types of retail outlet to the map is that retailers have always had a habit of finding gaps in the market where they can expand their range, in order to reach more customers. So whatever boxes we try to put shops into, somebody is trying to break out of them. We happily buy sweets from a newsagent, and kitchenware from a hardware shop.

It is difficult to measure how contributors tag individual shops, because variations in the data reflect variations in the real world. But because big chains tend to operate a lot of similar shops, we can look at the different ways these are tagged to get some idea of how contributors handle difficult categories.

To keep this in proportion, there are several large chains where there isn't much of an issue. In these cases there is a high level of consensus, and almost all branches in a chain carry similar tags. This suggests that most contributors see the same type of shop. Examples where more than 80% of branches carry the same value for the "shop" tag include Tesco, Sainsbury, Lidl, Morrisons, Asda, Aldi, Waitrose, Iceland, Somerfield and Tesco Metro = supermarkets; Londis, Premier, and One Stop = convenience stores; B and Q and Homebase = doityourself; Greggs = bakery; and Next = clothes.

Other chains seem to be operating across a genuine boundary between two similar categories. As a result a limited number of different tags have been used across the whole of the chain. Among the big chains this mainly applies to certain brands of supermarkets / convenience stores, typically with 50-75% of branches in one category, and the rest in another: examples include Co-op, Spar, Tesco Express, Costcutter, Cooperative Food, Sainsburys Local and Budgens.

Other chains have business models that are proving more difficult for contributors to categorise. This often seems to depend on how much emphasis the retailer places on offering a wide range of goods, or specialising in one type (or at least on how different contributors perceive this balance). In these cases different contributors normally choose between just a couple of options. For example, both shop=department_store and shop=clothes are commonly applied across chains such as Matalan, Debenhams, TK Maxx.

There are a few cases were there is a wide variety of different categories within the same chain, and little consensus between contributors. These seem to be chains that do not just offer a wide range of goods, but also compete with others that are much more specialised. There are a few where there is a huge mixture of tags. Contributors have used ten or more different values for "shop" to describe each of the following examples: Halfords (with 34 different values for "shop"; "bicycle" as the most common); Argos (25 different values for shop); Marks and Spencer; W H Smith; and Wilkinson.

So the challenge facing contributors is often that a shop offers a range of goods (or a shop format) that cannot easily be pinned down. But there are also some areas where there seems to be consensus among contributors on the type of shop they are dealing with, but not necessarily on the best tag to use. The most common examples use different terminology which means much the same thing - such as shop=betting or shop=bookmaker (for William Hill, Ladbrokes, etc). Either "shop=alcohol" or "shop=beverage" is common used for chains such as Bargain Booze, Oddbins, and Thresher.

Supermarkets and convenience stores are an example where one term is better recognised for smaller shops, and a different term among larger chains, with both covering similar scope. There are similar examples, including hardware shops and do-it-yourself stores, with a certain amount of overlap between the two.

Finally, there is the issue of spelling mistakes: abbreviations, plural / possessive forms, and alternative approaches to capitalisation and spacing ("newsagent", "news agent", "News Agent", "news_agent", or even "newspaper", or just "news"). It is not difficult to find examples like this, but in practice they don't seem to account for a significant proportion of the total. It is mainly a problem where the normal term for the shop is long, or uses more than a single word, but even there it's not a particularly serious problem. Out of the list of different terms for shops selling newspapers, "newsagent" accounts for 98% of occurrences in the database. In general, around 99% of shops with spelling variations are tagged with the most common value, while the rarer variants account for only 1%. As far as I can see the widest variations in the UK are among DIY shops (variously tagged : doityourself, diy, DIY, etc.) and estate agents (tagged "estate agency", "Estate Agent", "estate agents", "estate_agency", etc.). Even in these, the most common option has been applied across more than 90% of the sample.

The bottom line is that while it is easy to envisage a tool to fix spelling variants, this isn't the real challenge. There are a few cases where more consensus on terminology would make things a bit tidier. But the real challenge is to find better ways of handling nuances between the different business formats that we find in the real world - such as where we use different terminology for different sizes of shop, or for different levels of specialisation. It's hard to imagine a tagging scheme that is going to directly solve the problem of where to buy a spanner, a cycling magazine, or a bottle of balsamic vinegar. Some problems are probably best left to a fuzzy search process. In the meantime the best approach for contributors seems to be to stick to the common values when adding a shop; and pick the value that best describes what we see on the ground.

Nothing new there.

Spring cleaning

2012-01-19T00:12:00.001Z

I've just been weeding out dead links in the blog roll. I should have done it a couple of months ago. Because then I would have discovered earlier that Rob Ainsley's excellent Real Cycling burst back into life last November.

Schools

2012-01-18T12:28:00.002Z

In the same spirit as my earlier posts on OSM coverage of shops and healthcare facilities, I've now had a crack at estimating the number of schools that can be found on the map. I've used Department for Education figures to get an estimate of the number of schools we should find in each local authority area in England. These are pretty comprehensive. They include independent schools as well as state funded primary and secondary schools. They also include some nursery schools (basically those receiving state funding), special schools (for children with specific educational needs) and pupil referral units (for children excluded from other schools).

By comparing these figures with the number of features in OSM that are tagged as a school I get an overall figure for coverage of schools in England around 75% - which looks pretty good. Local authorities that have particularly thorough coverage include Cambridgeshire, York, Sheffield, Hartlepool, and Bath. There's a patch around Barnsley, Doncaster, and Rotherham where coverage is low.

Some of these figures look too good to be true. I suspect that my collection of OSM features is too crude, and that this results in some double counting - perhaps as a result of the way campuses have been tagged. That's going to take a while for me to investigate, but meanwhile, this is what the first iteration looks like.

Primary healthcare

2012-01-17T22:51:00.003Z

Our ability to access public services has been used as one indicator of social inclusion and quality of life.

To help with transport planning and other aspects of policy, governments have measured the ease with which we can access education, and healthcare, using public transport, walking or cycling. They also measure our ability to reach food shops, and employment. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to know how well OSM content covers similar ground.

Since policy makers see access to such facilities as being important, perhaps there are creative ways in which OSM data could be used to make it easier for people to reach key public services?

At the moment I can’t see how to replicate the official measures exactly. I can't see an easy way of measuring completeness of food shops, but I can get somewhere near by trying to measure how well all shops are covered. In healthcare I can compare lists of NHS GPs, Pharmacies, Opticians and Dentists in England with those I can find in the OSM database. I'm not sure where to find similar data for Scotland and Wales. At some point it should be possible to produce a similar measure for schools, but I haven't got round to it yet.

Breaking the lists down by local authority, I reckon that Halton, Wokingham, Cambridgeshire, Islington, and Derby score particularly well mapping local healthcare, with around half of their facilities mapped. Luton, Blackburn, and Doncaster have the most healthcare facilities to add. In those authorities I can find less than 2% of the number of facilities I expected to see in the database.

Looking at both healthcare and retail together, most places show similar levels of coverage for both. Derby and Islington seem to have particularly good coverage of retail, alongside some of the highest coverage of healthcare facilities. Other areas that rank highly on both counts include Bedford, Birmingham, Cambridgeshire, Camden, Halton, Southwark, and Wokingham.

It's worth noting that I'm using government data as a way of measuring OSM data, not the other way round, and this is not to suggest that OSM should be deliberately working towards a comprehensive directory of this stuff. It is interesting, though, to speculate what kind of new applications might start to be viable as coverage develops.

Convenience stores and supermarkets

2012-01-13T13:32:00.000Z

The standard classification system for different types of business uses the concept of "Retail sale in non‑specialised stores with food, beverages or tobacco predominating". This makes two important distinctions: between non-specialised, and specialised shops (Sainsbury's vs the local butchers); and between shops that are mainly concerned with food (Waitrose) and shops concerned with other stuff (John Lewis). It still covers a wide range of different types of business - from a hypermarket to a cinema kiosk (including village stores, NAAFI shops, confectioner / tobacconists, and old-fashioned grocers).

In this context, OSM contributors make widespread use of "supermarket" and "convenience store" to describe non-specialised food shops. There are a few tagged "kiosk", "general store" (in various spellings), or "grocer" (in various spellings) but these only amount to about 2% of the total in this area. There is only a smattering where different shop types are combined in forms such as "convenience;alcohol".

The retail experts, IGD, reckon that there are 91,500 stores selling groceries in the UK, of which almost 8,000 are supermarkets (or variants), and more than 48,000 are convenience stores. About 6,500 of the convenience stores are on forecourts. Most of these will probably be marked in OSM as a petrol station, rather than a shop. That leaves nearly 42,000 convenience stores that we should be able to find. However, this might still be over-stating things a bit. The Association of Convenience Stores reckons that there are 33,500 convenience shops in the UK.

Across Great Britain I can find 5,849 supermarkets in the OSM database, and 6,928 convenience stores. So on face value, current coverage of supermarkets is about 73% and coverage of convenience stores is about 16-20% (depending on what baseline we use).

Normally a convenience store is quite a small store, with extended opening hours, while a supermarket is larger, and opening hours are more tightly controlled. In the UK, shops smaller than 280 square metres (about 3,000 sq. ft.) have greater flexibility on Sunday trading hours.

Where a shop is added to OSM with a building outline we can get a rough idea of the floor space, and we can use 3,000 square feet as as way of distinguishing convenience stores and supermarkets. There's no point in being rigid about this, but in general a "supermarket" with a floor space of less than 3,000 square feet is probably a convenience store, and a "convenience store" with floor space of much more than 3,000 square feet is probably a supermarket.

Where I can measure them, the average floor space (actually building footprint) of a convenience store in the OSM database is 2,000 square feet, and the average floor space of a supermarket is 43,000 sq feet. Both are well inside the right range. However, about 4% of features tagged "supermarket" could be in the wrong category, and about 20% of features tagged "convenience store" could be in the wrong category (though most of these are still quite small). Re-allocating these according to size rather than tagging would take supermarket coverage up to almost 90%, and convenience store coverage down to around 14-17%.

The bottom line is that coverage of supermarkets looks pretty thorough - the majority are in the database, they can easily be identified, and tagging is pretty consistent. Coverage of convenience stores is better than for most types of shop, but could be more thorough. Many can easily be identified in the database, but some of those might better be tagged as "supermarket".

According to the Department for Transport, most of us are within 10 minutes of our nearest food store, and within reasonable travelling distance of 3 or 4. The chances are that at least one of these is in the OSM database, and at least one is still waiting to be added. The missing ones are likely to be some friendly local convenience store - not some massive supermarket chain. Which hardly seems fair.

The lost shoppers

2012-01-12T23:22:00.003Z

Today's retail trading statements make gloomy reading. Shops had a slow autumn, followed by heavy discounting over Christmas, and face various other pressures. I thought it might be timely to look further at OSM coverage of the retail sector to see how things were going from a different perspective.

So far, I reckon that about 10% of shops in the UK have been added to OSM, but it's a bit of a mixed picture.

The coverage varies by type of shop. Post Offices and Cycle shops seem to be well covered (I reckon that about half of each are in the database). Garden Centres, Clothes shops and Computer shops are covered better than most types of shop (around 20% of each have been included). Butchers and Off-licences are close to the average (at around 10%). However I can only find a small proportion of the expected number of Flower shops, Furniture shops, Fishmongers, Greengrocers and Hardware shops. On face value the coverage of supermarkets is particularly good, but these are difficult to classify accurately so these figures are a bit iffy. Given the public spirit that drives a lot of OSM activity I was slightly surprised to see that coverage of charity shops is quite low (6% or so).

There are regional variations. I reckon the most densely mapped areas have recorded around half of the shops on the high street, while the less well covered have recorded only one shop in a hundred. These rankings for shops follow a different pattern to the rankings of road coverage. For example, Derby and Islington are doing particularly well recording shops. Although Islington also comes fairly close to 100% in the ITO comparison with Ordnance Survey road data, Derby comes further down the same rankings. Wolverhampton does pretty well on both rankings, while Wigan scores well on streets, but near the middle on shops.

(with apologies to various rural counties, there was an error in the previous version of this map, which this one seems to fix)

To produce the map I extracted OSM data related to shops, and allocated each within the relevant local authority boundary. For comparison I use National Statistics on the distribution of retail units by local authority. This only covers VAT and PAYE registered businesses, so it will understate the actual numbers of shop units in each authority. Hence the raw percentages will be over-stated. However, it should be a good enough proxy to compare geographic distributions. To measure the proportion of each different type of shop recorded in OSM I used estimates of the actual number based on a mix of public domain data from National Statistics, Valuation Office data drawn from business rates, and figures from various trade bodies, and industry analysts.

Embedding a map

2012-01-11T11:20:00.001Z

Dara Ó Briain, no less, asked this on Twitter today "Does anyone know how to grab a portion of a map from google map, say, to include in a document?".

That was 11 hours ago, so he has probably had loads of answers by now. If not, here is how I would do it...

Go to Open Street Map.
Zoom and slide the slippy map to the area you need.
Hit the "Export" tab.
Choose the format you want (it's probably going to be Mapnik for a document, or embeddable HTML for a web page).
Choose the option you want (its probably going to be PNG or JPEG to embed in a a document. If you don't know which of these you want then it probably doesn't matter, so use the default. Use PDF if you want to email something that people can easily print).
Hit the Export button.

I claim my free puppy.

First ride of the year

2012-01-06T17:21:00.001Z

On the way I passed this milepost, which tells travellers how far they have to go to get from A to B. It's a kind of 19th century GPS I suppose - but I wouldn't want to carry one of these around with me.

I didn't do anything as exciting as travelling all the way from A to B today though. I just did a short, fairly hilly loop of a few miles.

In 1901 Charles Harper described this section of road as "a weariness and an infliction to the cyclist, for it goes on in a heavy three miles' continuous rise". I cunningly rode it in the opposite direction, so at this stage I was on a steady descent. I'd done the climbing earlier though, so I feel that I had paid my dues.

Ten bike rides that I won't be doing in 2012

2012-01-02T00:59:00.000Z

What with one thing and another I didn't get out on the bike as much as I would have liked in 2011. I've resolved that this year will be different, but one has to draw the line somewhere.

I believe the views at Alpe d'Huez are impressive, but it does look a bit crinkly.
I haven't got the right bike to participate in the Brompton World Championships
It's one thing not to wear special clothes for cycling, but another to wear none at all. For the sake of spectators I've decided that I should give the London Naked Bike Ride a miss again this year.
There are still a few days left to apply for the Fred Whitton Challenge, but I understand they are normally over-subscribed, so I ought to give somebody more deserving the chance to pick up the gauntlet.
Six months to cycle round the world? That's far more time than I can spare.
The Tweed Run promises a metropolitan bicycle ride with a bit of style. I don't qualify. Not even a bit.
There are good reasons why they invented the safety bicycle, and I wouldn't be joining the Knutsford Great Race, even if it was on this year.
I'll pass on this one as well. I don't know where it is, but it lies well outside my comfort zone.
I don't own any lycra. Just one reason for ruling out the Giro D'Italia
We now have enough space (and enough weather) for a virtual reality trainer, but I reckon that I've already spent far too much of my life sitting inside staring at a computer screen

And that's about it. There are a few rides left to chose from. Some of them might be a bit of a challenge, but mostly I suspect that I'm just going to be pootling around slowly, exploring the local area and enjoying myself for another year. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Number crunching

2011-12-28T13:30:00.001Z

I've been contributing in a small way to OSM for a while now, and I am always impressed by the amount of information that keeps being added to the map. Although there is still work to do on the UK transport network, I think most would agree that it is now well above the level of coverage needed to provide a valuable platform for all kinds of different applications.

What I didn't have a good feel for is how well other aspects of the map are covered. I like to measure stuff, so in the down-time between Christmas and New Year, I've been playing around estimating how many examples of different features we should expect to find in the database, and comparing that estimate to how many are actually recorded.

This is inevitably a bit rough and ready. I needed to estimate how many examples of a feature I should expect to find. Then I needed to figure out a simple way of measuring how many are already in the database; with a reasonable level of confidence that both figures are counting the same things. This doesn't always work. For various reasons it turns out that it's not straightforward to measure things like the number of public telephones, airports, windmills, car parks, cemeteries, and sports grounds. I've included some figures on facilities like restaurants, and hotels, but I suspect that the definitions used in different statistics might not be a very good match to the definitions used by contributors. With more care I might be able to improve these in future.

Still, it's a starting point, and with all sorts of caveats, I think I can identify some features that users of the data can generally expect to find already exist in the database:

Feature	Found	Estimate	Completeness
Bus stations	498	427	117%
Theatres	809	742	109%
Marinas	458	436	105%
Petrol stations	6,451	6,301	102%
Police stations	1,985	2,036	97%
Toilets	4,441	4,714	94%
Fire stations	1,500	1,642	91%

I think I can also identify some types of features where coverage is less complete, but where any particular example is still more likely to be found in the database than not. Some of these are already the target of concentrated activity to improve coverage. Perhaps others are the areas where some more careful analysis would be most useful.

Feature	Found	Estimate	Completeness
Museums	1,505	1,766	85%
Supermarkets	6,681	7,970	83%
Libraries	2,462	3,206	77%
Hotels	5,762	7,561	76%
Cinemas	578	763	76%
Schools	22,969	33,121	69%
Pubs	32,472	49,303	66%
Cafes	7,481	12,140	62%
Breweries	110	180	61%
A and E (England)	91	150	61%
Allotments	3,936	7,286	54%
Post Offices	7,372	14,000	53%
Cycle shops	1,253	2,500	50%

The list of features that I explored is deliberately pretty arbitrary. I covered some that I happen to be interested in; some where I had an estimate to hand, or could easily uncover one; some drawn from OSM project of the month / week activity, and others because I thought they might be of interest to contributors, or of value to map users. The following list shows some where it looks as though contributors will find it fairly easy to find additional examples to add to the map.

Feature	Found	Estimate	Completeness
Pret a manger stores	115	235	49%
Starbucks stores	330	717	46%
Restaurants	10,043	25,226	40%
Ice rinks	13	33	39%
Night clubs	548	1,507	36%
Hostels	454	1,260	36%
Golf courses	709	2,002	35%
Letter boxes	39,329	116,092	34%
Swimming pools	217	641	34%
Anglican churches	4,880	15,976	31%
Veterinary clinics	363	1,271	29%
Garden centres	733	2,621	28%
Community pharmacies	3,732	13,425	28%
Lifeboat stations	31	135	23%
Casinos	37	180	21%
GP surgeries	2,036	10,352	20%
Bowling alleys	103	528	20%
Convenience stores	7,972	48,289	17%
Sewage works	808	5,412	15%
Branches of Greggs	193	1,526	13%
Fish and chip shops	1,334	11,000	12%
National Trust properties	278	2,477	11%
English Heritage properties	64	584	11%
Shops of all types	47,797	458,275	10%
Piers	3	33	9%
Hairdressers	2,729	35,704	8%
Bookmakers	402	5,029	8%
Dentists	722	10,927	7%
Charity shops	559	9,000	6%
Newsagents	801	16,500	5%

Unsurprisingly, my impression is that coverage is generally better for the bigger features that are more obvious (e.g. schools), and for those which particularly interest the OSM community (More pubs than post offices. More bicycle shops than golf courses. Surprisingly few fish and chip shops, though there are some tagging variants that would slightly boost coverage of these if I collected them more systematically). Some of the services that potential users might expect to find are not so well covered (e.g. GPs and dentists).

Even if they are rough and ready, I think it has been useful to put numbers on some of this stuff. Partly because it helps to measure progress, partly to help think laterally about priorities, and partly as a sanity check on the amount of detail that is both practical and important. And not least because it already demonstrates an impressive level of coverage. However, there is no shortage of opportunity to record the existence of more interesting and useful features in 2012. You can bet on seeing more casinos and bookmakers; while other contributors get their teeth into the missing dentists.

I'll probably come back to this again. It's a bit of an iterative process, and if anyone wants to suggest a better estimate, a source of suitable data, or other features that I should try to measure, then please comment below.

More seriously

2011-12-21T14:31:00.000Z

For a far better version, do not bother reading my post below - go and look at what the Cycling Embassy has to say.

It seems that the rather bizarre resolution on making cycle helmets compulsory will be discussed by individual WI groups, before being considered at the annual meeting of their National Federation in May 2012.

The WI has 210,000 members, and 7,000 local organisations. Many of us have relatives, friends, or neighbours who are active members of the WI. This looks like an opportunity to get wider issues relating to cycling and road safety onto their agenda, and to help them to reach a more informed position on cycling helmets and safety.

Points they might be encouraged to consider include:

If they are going to take a stance on making cycling helmets compulsory, then delegates will want to find either conclusive evidence, or a high level of consensus which supports their position. Although it might seem obvious to the layman that using a cycle helmet will improve safety, in reality the issues are quite complex. Before deciding where they stand on this issue themselves, delegates who expect to be taken seriously will want to study a range of evidence. This is one starting point. And this is another. Delegates may also wish to survey the position taken by their friends and neighbours who cycle. Many regular cyclists know from experience that a helmet can protect them from certain injuries in certain cases (typically, bumping their head as a result of a straightforward tumble). As a result they will normally wear a helmet, and encourage others to do so. However, few will be under any illusion that a cycle helmet will provide worthwhile protection in the case of a more serious incident, such as collision with a car. This broadly matches the conclusion reached by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory in 2009. However, wider research will uncover a variety of views, and evidence that is far from conclusive.
A number of different approaches are currently used to improve cycling safety. Examples include special training for cyclists, campaigns to raise driver awareness of the risks, devices attached to large vehicles to improve visibility, and investment in separate cycle infrastructure. Before they endorse mandatory cycling helmets as the preferred solution, delegates will wish to consider alternative safety initiatives, and assess their effectiveness and the wider implications. The WI has a wide reach, high visibility, and considerable credibility. They will want reassurance that by endorsing one particular approach they are not encouraging drivers, cyclists, policy makers, and the general public to ignore or resist other safety measures that might, in practice, have greater potential to improve safety.
Cycling has been encouraged by successive governments on the basis of environmental and public health benefits. The WI has a history of supporting environmental causes, campaigning to reduce carbon emissions, and an interest in public health issues. Road traffic accounts for 22% of the UK's carbon emissions, and contributes to pollution, poor air quality, congestion and noise. Many see cycling as a viable alternative to using the car for shorter journeys; as a means of reducing the environmental impact of traffic, and of making the roads more accessible to people who have no alternative to using a car. While there are risks associated with almost any physical activity, many cyclists feel that the risks they face are exaggerated, and argue that, from a wider public health perspective, the risks associated with cycling are outweighed by the public health benefits. Changes to government policy in this area will be challenged by a vocal cycling community which generally believes that any disincentive to cycling will have a knock-on effect on policies related to public health and the environment; and that international experience suggests that encouraging more cyclists onto the roads is an effective way to improve safety for all cyclists. A claim that compulsory wearing of helmets will encourage more cycling will need to be substantiated.
The government faces a number of different issues, and is committed to reducing regulatory burdens and red tape. Any decent government is concerned to represent interests across the whole of society. So before recommending additional legislation in one particular area it would be prudent for the WI to develop a persuasive case why cyclist safety should take priority over other risks. Why, for example, should the deaths of 111 cyclists and injuries to 2,600 cyclists a year take precedence over 800 deaths due to obesity, 4,000 children who fall out of windows, 9,700 people injured as a result of drunk driving, or 500,000 elderly people admitted to A&E departments as a result of a fall at home?
It has been long established (in principle and practice) that roads are a shared asset, funded by general taxation. Everyone is entitled to use them, whether in a vehicle, on a cycle, a horse, or on foot. With a mix of traffic, the free flow of vehicles, and the safety of all road users depends on a high degree of collaboration and consideration. In principle, all those who share the roads have a responsibility to consider the safety of the more vulnerable. In practice, though, things are more confrontational. Many cyclists have experience of motorists shouting abuse, throwing things at them, or driving aggressively. Similarly cyclists are widely criticised for not considering the needs of motorists, and the safety of pedestrians. The WI is in the rare position of being able to encourage,on behalf of all road users, a more balanced, collaborative and considerate approach. If they end up endorsing the mandatory wearing of cycle helmets they risk being characterised as seeing the most vulnerable as being solely responsible for this aspect of safety; and siding with those who argue that those who face the highest transport costs have the greater level of entitlement.

You can find your nearest WI here.

And / or sign the petition here

We urge Her Majesty’s Government to make the wearing of helmets in the home a legal requirement

2011-12-20T17:42:00.000Z

We urge Her Majesty’s Government to make the wearing of helmets in the home a legal requirement in order to prevent unnecessary deaths or serious and long lasting injuries.

The purpose of helmets is to reduce the risk of serious injury to the head. There is currently no legal requirement in the UK to wear a helmet in the home.

More accidents happen at home than anywhere else. The cost to society of UK home accident injuries has been estimated at £25,000 million annually.

Every year in the UK more than 5,000 people die in accidents in the home and 2.7 million need treatment at an accident and emergency department (this compares to 111 pedal cyclists killed and 2,620 seriously injured on the roads).

Falls are the most common accidents in the home - 55% of accidental injuries in the home involve a fall. Every year more than 4,200 children are involved in falls on the stairs and 4,000 children under the age of 15 are injured falling from windows. However, the risk of falling in the home increases with age. Falls account for 71% of all fatal accidents to those aged 65 and over. The most serious injuries usually happen on the stairs.

But falling is not the only risk. In the United States the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported a significant number of injuries and deaths in the home related to televisions falling on children. More than half a million people a year suffer injuries to the head at home, and accidents in the home account for about 40% of all head injuries.

Hence, helmet wearing in the home could encourage more people to spend more time at home - particularly the elderly. However, some may consider that this resolution is too narrow. Perhaps it should propose compulsory helmet wearing as just one part of a wider drive to encourage more people to stay inside, where they will be safe. Or even compulsory wearing of a helmet at all times.

And if you think this sounds bonkers, consider the WI 2012 resolution short list briefings

RIP George Whitman

2011-12-15T09:06:00.001Z

Portas

2011-12-14T11:13:00.003Z

It would be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to the Portas review of the future of high streets. I'm no fan of celebrity-based policy development. These issues are complex, there are significant changes in play that are not going to be reversed, some of the remedies that have been bandied about are implausible (to put it mildly), and a number of powerful vested interests are busy grinding axes. However, in this case, her core message is important, and she is helping to get a real problem on the public agenda . It's the specific recommendations that need unpicking.

"I... fundamentally believe that once we invest in and create social capital in the heart of our communities, the economic capital will follow."

Her core idea seems to be that high streets should be developed as an asset to the community, so that economic benefits flow from social benefits, rather than approaching things the other way round. This approach seems right to me, and an insight that deserves widespread support. She offers some creative ideas about how her vision might be achieved. But the report ends with a number of specific recommendations, and here things begin to fall apart a bit. There are 28 in total, and my general feeling is that they could have done with a bit more consideration of how best central government can influence policy at a more local level.

For example, she recommends that local areas should implement free parking schemes, and just use parking revenues to improve parking. Oddly, Portas seems to recognise the wider context. The section covering the issues is even headed "access to town centres" - but then she dives straight into a discussion of parking issues, ignoring the others. And finally concludes that the solution is that parking needs to be insulated from the wider context. This just doesn't make sense to me.

Local authorities either need to generate additional income, or cut services (or both). Any money that doesn't come from parking will have to come from somewhere else. Retailers, and people who park cars have every right to plead that the impact should not fall on them. But everyone else has a right to make the same case. Parking provision costs money, so, in effect, providing free town centre parking is offering a local government subsidy to shoppers and retailers. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but if we push that issue up our ranking of priorities then something else goes down. I'm sure we all like the idea of having a vibrant town centre, but I doubt there is the same level of agreement about what we are prepared to give up to achieve it. Most importantly, resolving those trade-offs is the domain of local democracy, not Whitehall.
Secondly, parking is just one aspect of local transport policy. Personally I avoid taking my car into a town centre because I want to avoid congestion - not the cost of parking. Every car that brings someone into the town centre is contributing to congestion, and makes town centre access more difficult for others. Because of where they live, or because of mobility problems, some people can only reach their local shops by car. Depending on the quality of the local road network, level of parking provision, and extent of the public transport network, offering free parking may make things no better, and could make things worse for shoppers and retailers. I'm sure there are examples where free parking would help, but I'm pretty confident that it's no panacea.
Thirdly, town centres are not only competing with online, and out of town alternatives. They are also competing with each other. Visitors make a significant contribution to the health of some our most successful high streets. There is little future in encouraging a race to the bottom between neighbouring towns, based on the price of parking. If she is going to realise her vision, then neighbouring towns should be encouraged to compete on the quality of the experience, not prevented from doing so where her specific choice won't work

I know that retailers tend to obsess about parking issues, but her brief was to promote the high street, not encourage use of cars. So I don't understand why the report didn't recommend something more along the lines of "Local authorities must be encouraged to integrate public transport, parking and highways policy in a way that ensures that the high street is easily accessible to the whole community".

Something a bit less prescriptive, and a bit more local.

Participation

2011-12-12T23:15:00.003Z

Cycling* England collects figures on participation in different sports. The latest statistics were published last week, and relate to the year up to October 2011.

Sport England measure the proportion of adults participating in different sports. The measure of cycling covers recreational and competitive cycling but not cycling for travel purposes. It includes BMX, cyclo-cross and mountain biking.

In the first part of their survey year I would have qualified as participating in cycling, in the second part of the year I wouldn't. However, more than 8% of survey respondents did. That's more cycling than kicking footballs, and more than twice as many cycling as hitting golf balls. There are a lot of swimmers.

However, the detailed report on cycling shows that the amount of organised cycling remains fairly static, but there is a decline in informal cycling, and among some age groups.

* Not Cycling England, of course - that should be Sport England

Plug

2011-12-12T19:07:00.001Z

I've been trying out Bikehub, asking it to generate rides of 30, 60 and 90 minutes starting from home. Two of the routes that it has suggested are almost identical to two of the best routes that I found by myself, and the third is very similar to another.

I am hugely impressed.

But there are a couple of flies in the ointment.

All three rides took a lot longer than Bikehub suggested. I don't think I can blame them, though. I already knew that I have to work on my speed, and perhaps I should stop less often to admire the views.

And, if Bikehub can generate good rides so quickly and easily, what is my next excuse for poring over maps to work things out for myself?

Try it here

Points of interest gadget

2011-12-05T17:18:00.001Z

There are something in the region of a thousand scheduled monuments and protected historic buildings within cycling distance of where we now live. Some of them will be worth adding to OSM. I also see some of them as potential destinations or stopping points as I trundle around on the bike. I'm also trying to learn a bit about the area. So I'm interested in what is there, and where it is.

More importantly I felt like tinkering a bit with Openlayers on a smartphone.

So I've made myself a little gadget by kludging together various bits. There's a KML file of points of interest that I scraped (using Perl) from various published lists. I then edited the examples of Openlayers that use geolocation, display the OSM map, and overlay a KML file. The result is that I now have an "app" (really a web page with a slippy map) that works on a smartphone to mark Points of Interest with a pushpin. It follows me around, staying centred on my current location. A brief description of each point will pop up when a pin is touched.

For me it was a bit of a learning curve to get this working, but that says more about my limited expertise than it does about how difficult it really is. In truth none of it is very complicated.

To begin with I found it most useful at pointing out things that I hadn't noticed beforehand. Several buildings that I had been passing without a second glance turned out to be more interesting than I realised.

Now I've tried using it to locate a specific destination - and that worked fine as well. As I came home on a bitterly cold evenng it occurred to me that when our visitors arrive for Christmas and want to explore the area, we can send them out with this - while we stay warm indoors.

Pre-loading a smart phone with a collection of things that need fixing on the map seems like something that would be useful to the OSM community. An even larger group of people might like to pre-load the equivalent of a local guide-book.

But those happen to be the first two things I thought of. The nice thing is that, with the right tools in place it's fairly easy to generate data sets for displaying all sorts of different kinds of point of interest on a map.

Somebody must already have thought of this, and produced something a bit more sophisticated than my little gadget.

But who?

Charles Harper heads north

2011-12-02T22:05:00.001Z

I discovered Charles Harper, and his "Cycle Rides Round London" when we lived in the Thames valley. It provided me with some ideas for interesting rides, rediscovering the routes that he described in 1902, or thereabouts.

Now we have moved to the other end of the country, I've been sampling his book on the Great North Road. I doubt if this is going to prove a useful way of devising routes, but parts of it are a still a bit of a treat (once you get used to the language).

As usual Mr Harper is pretty pungent about the local aristocracy, but it is new to find him being equally rude about the weather. Sometimes he combines the two. He suggests, for example, that border warfare was the way that the northern aristocracy kept warm (and that football took its place when the courts started to take a dim view).

He was writing some fifty years after railways had displaced coaches as the main way of travelling between London and Edinburgh. On reaching Darlington, he expounds on the different merits of the two systems.

Describing the railway as "a method of progression which does not admit of outside passengers" he continues...

Nothing in its special way can be more exhilarating than travelling by coach as an "outside"; few things so unsatisfactory as the position of an "inside"; and if a well-groomed coach is a thing of beauty, there is also a beautiful majesty in a locomotive engine that has been equally well looked after. One of the deep-chested Great Northern expresses puffing its irresistible way past the green eyes of the dropped semaphores of some busy junction at night-time, or coming as with the rush and certainty of Fate along the level stretches of line that characterise the route of the iron road to the North, is a sight calculated to rouse enthusiasm quite as much as a coach. Nor are railways always hideous objects. It is true that in and around the great centres of population where railway lines converge and run in filthy tunnels and along smoke be-grimed viaducts they sound the last note of squalor, but in the country it is a different matter.

The embankments are in spring often covered with a myriad wild flowers ; the viaducts give a human interest to coombe and gully. Lovers of the country can certainly point to places which, once remote and solitary, have been populated and spoiled by the readiness of railway access; but the locomotive has rendered more holidays possible, and has kept the roads in a decent solitude for the cyclist.

Imagine, if you please, the Great North Road nowadays without the railway. A hundred coaches, more or less, raced along it in the last years of the coaching age, at all hours of the day and night. How many would suffice for the needs of the travelling public to-day ? and what chance would be left to the tourist, afoot or awheel?

More than 100 years ago, he saw railways freeing the roads for cyclists.

There's a thought.

The book can be downloaded here.

Stramongate School

2011-11-09T20:08:00.001Z

We were wandering round Kendal yesterday when we discovered this building with a sign explaining that Stramongate School has connections with two famous scientists.

John Dalton taught here from 1781 to 1793. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, was born here in 1882, when his father was headmaster.

John Dalton worked on developing atomic theory.

As regular visitors to Tlatet should already know, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was a British astrophysicist who is known for explaining and confirming the theory of relativity. But when he wasn't distracted by work he devised a measure of long distance cycling. The Eddington Number is defined as E, the number of days a cyclist has cycled more than E miles.

Where can you cycle to in an afternoon?

2011-10-22T18:55:00.001+01:00

It has been another lovely autumn day today. I thought I would set off after lunch and see how far I could get along the coast. The plan was to head north until 3pm, then turn round and head back again.

It turns out that I can reach Chinon in the Loire Valley. Or, as it is known around here, "Bamburgh".

I claim Chinon, on the basis that The Lion in Winter is set in Chinon, and they are using a picture of Bamburgh Castle on the poster for the current production at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. It's perfectly recognisable, under Robert Lindsay's beard, though it seems to be back-to-front. Since Chinon has a medieval castle of its own it's a slightly odd choice.

My route crossed the East Coast main line several times, and as I rode towards one of the level crossings the barriers were closed. As I got closer I watched the train pass, then as I approached the barrier it opened to let me through with perfect timing. It was a magical moment and from then on I seemed to be riding more easily. I built up speed, and felt I was flying along with little effort.

Once I reached my destination I realised why it had got so easy. Sadly it was nothing to do with my performance at all. A tail wind had been building up, and it was pushing me along as I headed north. On the return journey I was riding into the wind, and found it more heavy going.

However, the wind aside, it was a good clear day, with lovely views towards the Farne islands. That's been my longest ride for a long time, and now that I'm home I feel tired, but pleased with myself. I didn't see Robert Lindsay, or Joanna Lumley though.

(I was going to show my age by remembering Bamburgh as one of the locations for the 1968 film of The Lion in Winter. But that would really have shown the toll that age is taking. I think it was actually the 1964 film Becket that I was remembering - wrongly).

Jum today

2011-10-15T17:43:00.001+01:00

One of the quirks of place-names around here is that an ending of -gham is normally pronounced "jum". So Bellingham, for example, is pronounced "Bellin-jum" rather than "Belling-ham". This isn't always the case though. Chillingham is pronounced the way it is written.

What has been confusing me even more are two places fairly close to each other called Edlingham (pronounced Edlin-jum) and Eglingham (pronounced Eglin-jum). I get the two of them muddled.

Both names have Anglo-Saxon origins. Edlingham was the home of Eadwulf, and Eglingham the home of Ecgwulf. This was before we had post-codes, and Anglo-Saxon postmen obviously liked to keep things simple.

Today I decided I would ride to both. They looked like interesting places, and they are connected by about 10 miles of quiet country lanes. I thought it would make a nice ride, and it might stop me getting them mixed up. And pronouncing them wrongly.

This was definitely one of my better ideas of the week. Both places are lovely. Edlingham is perhaps the more interesting to visit. It boasts an 11th century church, a 14th century ruined castle, and a large viaduct left over from the old Alnwick to Cornhill railway. For what it is worth, it also lies on the Devil's Causeway, an old Roman Road that ran from Hadrian's Wall to Berwick-upon-Tweed. But Eglingham also has a church with a 13th century tower. And it has a pub too, but I forgot to take any money with me, so I didn't feel I could really drop in to sample it.

The main point of the outing though, is that the road connecting the two is terrific for my level of cycling. It rolls gently, without being too strenuous, and the views are wonderful. It's also very quiet. I thought I was going to be able to say that I only saw one car in almost ten miles, but just as I was entering Eglingham there was another. Two cars in almost ten miles isn't too bad. Almost like having a dedicated cycle path to myself.

The ride out wasn't bad either. It was a bit more hilly than I am comfortable with, but it was almost as quiet as the main stage. I must have seen half a dozen vehicles in about ten miles. And the views here were quite something too.

My route back was on a busier road (at least a dozen cars in nearly ten miles), and the views weren't in the same league, but it was an easier ride - because it was largely downhill.

I've seen quite a bit of wildlife today - mostly pheasants, but there were also a few circling birds of prey that I can't identify. Judging by the quantity of fresh road-kill there were even more pheasants around yesterday. It's a bit puzzling how so many of them managed to get hit by so few vehicles.

The only other cyclist that I saw was on the way back. For a long time they were riding ahead of me in the distance, but then they stopped and as I passed they were crouched over something on the verge. Naturally I stopped to check that everything was OK. "I'm fine", was the answer, as they put a fresh pheasant into their pannier bag.

Today was perfect autumn weather for a ride, but this would be a good route even on a day that was less than ideal. I'll definitely be going the same way again. However, we have other plans for the rest of the weekend, and I'm afraid I won't be visiting either 'jum tomorrow.

Please refrain from parking on the footpaths

2011-10-09T20:52:00.001+01:00

In another universe all the road signs are as polite as this one.

On the grid

2011-10-08T21:08:00.001+01:00

In our previous house Wifi comfortably reached all rooms, and provided some coverage into the garden, but before we moved we were starting to have intermittent problems losing broadband access. We decided that the best thing was to transfer the old equipment into this house and wait to see what happened.

In this house we have almost 2 feet of stone on some internal walls, and there is a longer reach to some parts of the building. We found that we could get a decent wireless signal in most of the main rooms. But it was no surprise to discover that the signal was a bit flimsy in other places. And we continued to have the same intermittent problems with dropping broadband. So we decided it was worth replacing our old Wireless Router / ADSL Modem with separate ADSL Modem, and smarter wireless router.

I'm always a bit wary of fiddling with network stuff. It seems like a bit of a dark art, and I tend to panic and start flailing around when things go squiffy. But for once installing and configuring it all went remarkably well. Credit is due to those who design the software. The only real problem I encountered was that immediately after placing the order I realised that I hadn't changed the default delivery address properly. I had to ring up the supplier and explain that I was an idiot who had moved house. They were very helpful. From then on, everything went pretty much to plan. It has been working for the last week or so, touch wood. And I can prove that by posting this.

Happily, the wireless signal does seem to be stronger in the more distant parts of the house. Also, for whatever reason, we no longer seem to be dropping the broadband connection occasionally (touch wood again).

Unfortunately, after sorting all that out, I discovered a few days ago that my GPS system for the bike has also gone belly up. I've tried all the obvious fixes, with no result. All I can get is a blank screen.

A replacement will have to wait, so in the meantime I'm trying out some of the alternatives on the smartphone. So far I've only used these while walking, rather than while cycling, because on foot it's easier to fiddle without falling over and it doesn't matter so much when you bump into things.

I'm quite impressed with apps for collecting GPS tracks. There seems to be a decent choice, with each concentrating on a different mix of priorities. I've found one that seems to fit my needs, and which is particularly adept at collecting tracks and transferring them into OSM. This seems like an elegant way of exploiting the technology, and using it to combine a number of different functions into a sensible solution which is easy to use.

However, I'm not so taken with the apps that emulate the functions of a basic cycle computer. A bit like those which emulate a compass or a spirit level, they look lovely. But I don't really understand the point in investing so much effort in getting a relatively expensive piece of complex technology to look and act like a relatively inexpensive piece of fairly simple technology.

You know who you are

2011-10-01T20:52:00.001+01:00

There are lots of good reasons to go cycling, and losing weight isn't one of the best. However, it is what got me re-started. Without any scientific evidence whatsoever, here are my tips for anyone else who wants to lose weight cycling. In no particular order:

It's probably bulk that matters to you, rather than weight. So assess progress by the length of your waistband rather than your weight. This is a more visible measure, and improvements are likely to be more predictable, so progress is more satisfying. And it avoids any need to explain that increased weight is due to converting fat into muscle
Find a good greasy spoon about 5 miles away, and ride there for a bacon sandwich whenever you fancy one. You get to eat all the bacon sandwiches you want (at about 350 calories each) but you burn off more than that in getting there and back
Work out a standard half hour route, and try to ride it on more days than you don't. It's really easy to think of excuses to avoid more ambitious rides, but it's hard to invent excuses for avoiding something which is so quick and easy
Write down some goals, and tell people about them. It doesn't really matter what they are. What matters is that you write them down and tell people. Anyone with a bit of imagination can fool themselves into thinking they are achieving a goal that they haven't written down or shared.
Once you've told people about your goals, it's important that you brag about achieving them. If you find you can't achieve them, then just change them to something easier. If they turn out to be so easy that you are embarrassed to brag about them, then change them to something harder
Getting a bike solves nothing. You are going to have to ride it. And unless you are having fun you won't. So find some better reasons than weight loss for going for a ride

Guano shed

2011-09-29T08:28:00.001+01:00

The other day I rode to see a ruined Guano shed, that lies just south of Alnmouth.

The building dates from the 18th century, Guano was imported as a fertiliser, and because of its smell it was stored as far as possible from the harbour (goodness knows how the sailors coped on the voyage). But in 1806 a fierce storm caused the river Aln to change direction. Alnmouth church and cemetery were cut off from the village, and Alnmouth harbour silted up. After that the Guano shed was re-used as a barn.

It would be nice to describe this as being a bit of a sh*t destination. But that wouldn't be right, although there's not much left of the shed. Even the bit of roof mentioned in the official listing seems to have disappeared. The location is interesting though. It should be possible to scramble over the high dunes to reach the beach (I didn't attempt this). There are fine views of Alnmouth over the estuary. You can still see quite clearly where the old course of the river has silted up. There is also a view of a ruined chapel that was built in an attempt to re-open the cemetery on Church Hill after the river changed course.

From a personal point of view this has satisfied a long-standing itch. I've been visiting Alnmouth since I was knee-high to a thrupenny bit, I've looked over the river many times, and wondered what it was like on the other side. But I'd never been there. And now I have.

National Cycle Route 1 runs parallel to the A1068 between Warkworth and Lesbury. Just north of the turning to High Buston there is a track that leads east to the dunes. This has a pretty rough surface, and I wouldn't suggest riding it on a highly tuned road bike. But it was OK on a touring bike, and it should be fine on anything with a bit of suspension. The map is here, but you can see more of the ruins, dunes and beach from a satellite (the row of dots along the back of the beach are anti-tank defences from WW-II)

A proper ride (at last)

2011-09-27T18:41:00.001+01:00

This afternoon I took off for what I think qualifies as my first proper ride in months.

I don't think of it as a proper ride because of the distance (which was only a little more than other recent outings). Nor because it was particularly strenuous (I was working quite hard at times, but I really ought to accept this as the norm, and stop going on about it).

It qualifies as a proper ride because I set off to explore some familiar places, and as with all the best outings, I ended up finding some which were unexpected.

One of my destinations was Warkworth - a pretty town, well known for its imposing castle, its Norman bridge and church and the views along the main street. I've been there many times, but I've only cycled through once. I've never explored away from the main sights, and main routes. This time I entered the town along the conventional route, but I left heading westwards.

Warkworth is almost completely surrounded by the River Coquet, and the road I chose crosses it via a ford. I chose this route partly because I enjoy riding through fords. Like riding through puddles, it appeals to my inner child. But the others that I've ridden through have only been small. This is more of a grown-up ford. It looked very wide - wide enough that I couldn't judge how deep it was in the middle. And it looked as though it was going to be slippery.

I had second thoughts, and considered using the footbridge. But then, surely the river must be relatively low at the moment. What's the worst that could happen? An hour's ride home, soaking wet, covered in mud didn't seem too awful a prospect. I asked myself: man or a mouse? or otter?

I decided to risk it.

I took it steady, and tried to stick to the tracks left by cars, because they seemed less slippery.

The first third was fine. After that the water was deep enough to be coming over my feet as I pedalled. I couldn't see any clear tracks to follow. The wheels were starting to slide about a bit.

An hour's ride home, soaking wet, covered in mud was beginning to look quite likely. But the worst didn't happen. I managed to stay upright, and I kept pedalling. With the exception of my feet, I had a dry ride home.

And although I've ridden past an imposing castle, a Norman bridge and church and I've again seen the lovely views along Warkworth main street, it's the experience of crossing the ford that I will remember.

Postscript - the ford was originally tagged "highway=ford" on OSM. That's in line with the recommended approach, and the way that I would have done it. Routing seems to work OK, but the ford itself wasn't rendering. So it looked as though there was a gap in the road on Mapnik and OCM. I know we shouldn't tag for the render, but because this ford is so long the gap was obvious (and misleading). I've changed the tagging to "highway=minor, ford=yes" with a node where it cross the centre of the river tagged "highway=ford, ford=yes". I'm hoping that this will provide more appropriate rendering, while maintaining a record of "what is on the ground". We will see, and if anyone has a better alternative the link is here.

One real, and one virtual ride

2011-09-26T20:02:00.001+01:00

My brother visited us for the weekend. He brought some cycling clothes, and the two of us managed to get out for a couple of rides. One of them was just to check that my spare bike was in good working order. That one is hardly worth counting. This morning we were a bit (not much) more ambitious.

Nice views, fine weather, quiet roads, and good company made for a very pleasant ride of a couple of hours. However, both of us are a bit out of practice. We went further than we had planned but not quite as far as the coast.

After lunch my brother left us to head home. At that point I could have worked on reducing our long list of things that need to be done. On reflection, my wife and I decided that it made a lot more sense to go for a walk along the coast instead.

We headed north of Boulmer, and followed part of the coastal path, which here doubles as National Cycle Route 1. This part of the path runs past a series of lovely, secluded sandy bays. There are views up the coast to Dunstanburgh castle, and quite a variety of of sea birds to watch.

It's more than two years since I cycled this way. It's a lovely ride, and now we don't live so far away I should be able to ride it more often. But having said that, this part of the path is also a pleasure to walk. It's slower on foot of course, and you can't cover as much ground as you can on a bike. But it's easier on foot to get down to the beach, splodge through the sand and scramble over the rocks.

In brief, today I've fitted in both a nice ride, and a nice walk. I've seen several different types of seabird that I cannot name, And I've recalled a good ride from a couple of years ago. That adds up to a pretty successful day. Oh, and I also set up our new phone. The rest of the to-do list will wait.

One less excuse

2011-09-24T12:54:00.000+01:00

It was a short, but pleasant ride over to the local bike shop this morning. I returned with a new chain on the touring bike, and a basic frame pump. They fitted the chain, and adjusted the indexing while I waited. The pump will replace the one that was liberated from the hybrid before we moved.

I asked about the best local rides, and the advice they gave is starting to sound familiar. The suggestion is to start by heading northwards along the coast (which is as flat as it gets). As I get better at dealing with the hills, I should work towards the more dramatic landscape further west.

It was a nice ride this morning. The local bike shop was very friendly, and helpful. But it was hardly a challenging ride. With a new chain, a promise of good weather, and a bit of a hold-up on the work front, I really must stop procrastinating, and get myself off for a bit more of a stretch.

Catwalk report

2011-09-17T16:11:00.002+01:00

I realise that visitors to Tlatet are far too polite to ask, but I can tell from coverage in today's papers that at the start of London Fashion Week there must be considerable interest in what I wore for this morning's ride.

Starting at the top...

A threadbare cotton jumper, over a dark blue shirt. The shirt could be from almost anywhere, and probably is, but the jumper isn't just any jumper. It's a green Marks and Spencer jumper. I like to think of it as an understated tribute to Yehuda Moon.
My trousers were dark blue cords, accented by patches of brown. I adapted these few months ago when I was a bit careless stripping varnish from some old furniture, without bothering to change into something that was even more appropriate for a messy job. They have been washed many times since - it must have been good varnish.
On my feet I wore an old pair of brown casual shoes, bought, as far as I remember, from a Clarks discount outlet (it was a long time ago). They recently acquired some splashes of white when we were painting the garden shed.

As I was cycling this morning, I did make a couple of special adjustments. On the rare occasions that I come off the bike I tend to bang my head, so it always seems like a good idea to wear a helmet. And to stop my trousers getting tangled in the chain I wore my lucky reflective cycle clips.

Clearly this is not a look that anyone can just go and buy off the shelf. It has taken years of refinement. So having achieved something close to sartorial perfection I don't vary it much. I didn't have to change this afternoon to take rubbish to the tip. Apart from a clean shirt, socks etc., I wore the same yesterday for taking down some shelves, and the day before for some light gardening. I suspect that little will be different tomorrow. That is, unless the jumper or trousers have to disappear into the wash, in which case I will be thrown into confusion.

Postscript: afterwards we found most of the missing parts of our shutters up in the loft, covered in decades of debris. After scrabbling around to get them down through the hatch, today's outfit did go into the washing, and I've scrubbed up.

A long half hour

2011-09-17T11:50:00.001+01:00

Despite a forecast of rain, this morning turned out to be beautiful. I had intended to take a couple of loads to the tip, then move some of the clutter around so that we will be ready to strip another room next week.

However, I was told (in fairly strong terms) not to be so silly, and to get out on the bike for "half an hour".

In reality that turned into a two hour ride, heading (more or less) directly north, then retracing the same route back. The first part of the ride crosses a valley, but beyond that it's about as flat things get around here. For the furthest part of the ride I was on the Sustrans cycle route that follows the Northumberland coast, but at that point it runs some way in land, so there were only occasional glimpses of the sea.

One of our new neighbours does a bit of cycling locally, and they have suggested three approaches to deal with the hills. Option one: get used to them. Option two: stick the bike in the car and take it somewhere flat, and option three: explore the area I chose today. To the extent that I have a plan, it's to follow a mix of all three.

Although today's ride was fairly flat, there was a bit of a headwind on the way back. I felt that I was having to work quite hard, but that's probably more to do with a lack of practice. Apart from the wind, the weather was near perfect. It was clear and sunny, but quite cool - particularly early on. The countryside was looking nice, and I diverted through a couple of pretty villages. For the more dramatic landscapes I will either have to head over some bigger hills, or get further along the coastal route, where it is nearer to the sea, and you get more than glimpses of the coast.

Traffic wasn't too bad. I was on reasonably quiet roads, by local standards, and they are a lot quieter than I was used to in the Thames valley. There were only a few other cyclists around: a couple who looked as though they were touring, and some who looked like locals cycling to the shop. Quite properly, greetings were exchanged with every cyclist I passed, as well as with most pedestrians and bystanders.

Neatsfoot Compound

2011-08-24T11:27:00.010+01:00

I'm taking a short break from clearing the garden shed. On one of the shelves we discovered this can of Neatsfoot Compound. Until fairly recently I wouldn't have known what it was, but in recent years it came up regularly in conversation with my wife's father.

My father-in-law was born in 1918, and had been a keen cyclist in his youth. When I began cycling again a few years ago, he wanted to help me keep on the right lines, so we heard some interesting stories, and I was never short of advice. He was a big advocate of Brooks saddles, and strongly recommended applying Neatsfoot Oil to the leather.

It's not something that I had come across before. I did chose a Brooks saddle for the touring bike, but I've been using Brooks Proofide to dress the leather.

We know that there were some keen cyclists in this house before us. They seem to have agreed with my father-in-law.

According to Wikipedia Neatsfoot oil is a yellow oil rendered and purified from the shin bones and feet (but not the hooves) of cattle. "Neat" in the oil's name comes from an old name for cattle. It has nothing to do with those not in employment, education or training (that would be neets-foot oil). I see that Vanner and Prest Neatsfoot Compound is available: here.

Cut Throat Letch

2011-08-23T17:48:00.007+01:00

One of the most useful books on my shelf of cycling stuff is "The Golden Wheels of Albert Winstanley" by Albert Winstanley. It isn't useful because it is packed with valuable information. It's useful because it encourages me to go out exploring on the bike. It takes an approach that some might find old-fashioned, but which suits me fine. On each of the trips that Albert describes he takes obvious delight in some aspect of history, the landscape, or just the name of a place. In that spirit I rode off this afternoon to explore some minor country lanes, and to find a stream called Cut Throat Letch.

I have no idea where the "cut throat" bit comes from, but in this context, letch comes from an Old English word, leccan, which means to make something wet. It's related to the verb to leak. Around here it normally refers to a stream that runs slowly through a bog. And that's pretty much what we have here.

So it's nothing much to look at. But as a name for a destination you couldn't ask for much more. I have had a nice ride on quiet roads, and now I can drive the family nuts by going around for the rest of the evening saying

<pirate voice>"I've been to cut throat letch"</pirate voice>.

Over the hills, not far away

2011-08-20T20:14:00.009+01:00

No cycling today, but we discovered a lovely walk from Bellingham through ancient woodland to this waterfall at Hareshaw Linn. We were a bit late - this walk seems to have been popular since Victorian times. Details here.

This was originally intended to be a side trip on the back of our other plans, but they went a bit pear-shaped, and our walk turned out to be one of the highlights of the day.

The other highlight was the magnificent road out to Bellingham, passing through the National Park. The weather was perfect, the views were magnificent, and the roads were lovely and quiet.

We saw a few cyclists on the way, climbing the hills, and swooping down the descents. For me the car was doing the hard work today, and I could only envy those on two wheels. The roads over these hills must provide marvellous cycling.

At this stage I know that I couldn't manage them comfortably myself, but I already aspire to be in good enough condition to tackle them. What I realised today was that the proper goal is to be in good enough condition to enjoy them, not just to tackle them. It remains to be seen whether that's possible, but I live in hope.

RTFM

2011-08-18T13:55:00.003+01:00

When we acquire a new gadget we always keep instructions, and carefully file them away in any number of different places. The places I put them make perfect sense at the time, but not much afterwards. On top of that, when we get rid of a gadget we never think to dispose of the obsolete instructions. One day the house will be full of instructions for things we no longer own, and we will have to move out.

You can't read the f'ing manual unless you can find it, and because I'm not properly organised it's become near impossible to find instructions when I need them. Usually I need them when the clocks go forward or back; or when a battery needs replacing. So when the battery needed replacing on the cycle computer I did what I always do. I had a half-hearted look in several different places to try and find the original instructions. I found all sorts of other interesting stuff, but not what I needed. So I gave up and fiddled around for a while trying to work it out by myself. Just before I got frustrated and destructive, I went and downloaded a copy of the instructions from the web site. Not for the first time, we next had a protracted debate about the best place to buy lithium button cell batteries, until my wife had to go into town. She kindly brought back the ones I needed.

Fitting the battery only took a matter of a minute or two. It took much longer to re-set the clock and enter the right tyre size. I'm sure I must have written down the right setting for the tyres last time, and I filed it with the instructions (how pointless that was). This time I didn't bother. Now the old battery is waiting with all the other stuff that needs to be taken to the recycling place.

It's only changing a battery for goodness sake. How can such a trivial task end up being so complicated?

Grand old Duke of York

2011-08-15T16:57:00.002+01:00

Squeezed between getting ourselves organised, doing the tasks that have to be done, greeting visitors, meeting neighbours, and otherwise enjoying ourselves, I have managed a short outing on the bike this morning. I only had a limited amount of time, so it seemed best to face up to the contours of the land, and head straight out to explore possible routes over our nearest decent hill. I reckon that once I'm a bit more comfortable with climbing that, several interesting longer routes will open up to me.

I did manage to climb it, but I was a long way off being comfortable. The first part wasn't too steep, and I was able to acknowledge the morning dog walkers without looking like a complete numpty. But further on as the road got steeper I was beginning to puff and pant a bit. Luckily, by then there was nobody else around, so I didn't feel I was at risk of embarrassing myself. Then the road levelled out a bit more and I realised that I had earned some lovely views. From higher ground I could also begin to see the line of some of the more ambitious rides that I am planning.

Today wasn't a good day for me to undertake any of those though. There are too many things on the To-Do list. So I turned back to loop home, and carefully negotiated an even steeper route back down the hill.

A ride like that is never going to add much to the mileage in my spreadsheet. However, it was good to get out. When I was up I was up. The views were worth the climb, and I've got a better idea of potential future rides.

And now I am down, am I down? A few hours after I got home my legs are still feeling the effects. I might not have got as much done today as I planned, but I can definitely feel that it did me good to take some time out.

Normal service to be resumed shortly

2011-08-03T18:23:00.000+01:00

We have now moved into our tenth home, far from the Thames Valley, near the Northumberland coast.

Choosing where to live has always been a big decision, and usually involves some compromises, but this time we haven't been as constrained by work and family commitments as we have in the past. With more options, and without others forcing some of the decisions, we have had to make up our own minds about what is important to us. Obviously the promise of some decent cycling featured somewhere in the list, but there were a lot of other things to consider too. So we've taken our time coming to a decision, and over time we have built up some high expectations.

So far, a week after we moved, things seem to be working out. We are gradually getting stuff sorted. My bike was the first thing to come off the removal van, but on balance it didn't seem the best idea to ride off immediately. In any case, it has taken longer to discover the related stuff. All the important things are unpacked now, though, and today we reached the point where I felt I could take off for a couple of hours to go exploring.

I rode out towards the coast, taking a 15 mile loop, mostly along quiet country roads. It was glorious, with almost perfect weather, and lovely views. Away from town, I came across very little traffic.

I thought I had picked a fairly flat route for my first outing, but it was still more hilly than I'm used to. However, every important decision involves some compromises. I will just need to work on my hill climbing (which is probably not a bad thing). When I stopped for a break, another cyclist pulled up to share the bench, and we had a chat about the best local routes. I already had some ideas, but now I have some more to try.

This is going to be fun.

Cycle to enhance your career prospects

2011-07-25T11:41:00.005+01:00

There's an interview with Ed Williams, the Chief Executive of Right Move in the business section of the Times today.

For those who haven't moved house recently, Right Move is a web site that consolidates information from Estate Agents on property for sale or rent. According to the article it is a highly successful business, and one of Britain's most popular web sites.

Ed Williams ascribes the success of his site to three principles: keeping things simple, making sure the information it provides is up to date, and hiring the right people. To quote the article, he has a penchant for people who do sports such as cycling and rowing, where there is no downtime, rather than football or cricket.

"We look for people who stick at something, who just keep doggedly at it".

I am never going to know whether cycling would have had a positive impact on (what some laughingly describe as) my career, because I got interested too late. When cycling does come up in conversation with work colleagues we tend to talk about the destinations, and the challenges we set ourselves. I suppose that sits well with the idea of doggedly determined cycling. I tend to skip over the sheer pleasure of just pootling around by myself, enjoying the sense of freedom. Emphasising my slow pace, and anti-social approach might reveal more than I really want to, about my lack of enthusiasm for corporate culture.

More 1/2 inch map

2011-07-19T13:33:00.002+01:00

Thanks to my brother I now have an original Bartholomew's half-inch map of Northumberland, dating (I think) from 1957.

From that date, it doesn't show the Alnwick bypass, which was built in 1968, and it does show the Alnwick branch line, which closed in 1968. Before it closed this line operated some of the last steam-hauled passenger services under British Rail. The map also shows the Alnwick to Coldstream line, which was never very commercially successful. It would have been closed by 1957, but presumably the track was still in place.

Earlier Bartholomew's maps had covered Northumberland in two sheets. This one covers virtually the whole of Northumberland, from Berwick to the Tyne, but misses a little around Allendale in the south, and around Haltwhistle in the West.

Insurance

2011-07-07T16:58:00.000+01:00

The quote we got for house and contents insurance is remarkably thorough. It seems to cover pretty much everything we need, including loss or damage of a bicycle worth up to £5,000. They will even pay for professional counselling under certain circumstances.

But there are some tight conditions on what they cover following a violent domestic dispute.

So I'm not going to be spending £5,000 on a new bike any time soon.

Compass

2011-06-24T17:16:00.005+01:00

I got this from a flea market in Paris about ten years ago. I told myself that it was to help me find my way walking along the Paris meridian. Really I just liked the look of it.

When I moved back to the UK it went missing, and I assumed it was lost for good. But we have been taking a load of boxes out of the loft for sorting, and it has turned up again, along with a lot of other bits and bobs.

On the back it says "Stanley London, 1935". There is a folding prism on the side, which is obviously for taking bearings, but until this afternoon I hadn't managed to figure out how to use it.

A lost compass was never much help, and I don't suppose a found one is going to get a lot of use either. But it's nice to have it back.

Under construction

2011-06-13T15:31:00.006+01:00

This is part of the original Bartholomew's revised "half-inch" contoured map of Herts and Bucks. We found it in a second-hand bookshop a few days ago. The history on the back cover says:

"This map has unique record among cartographical publications. The first sheets were brought out in 1875 with simple colouring by counties. At the Paris Exhibition of 1878 Mr Bartholomew showed specimen sheets printed in layer or contour colouring. That system was eventually adopted for the whole publication, which thus became the first topographical series in any country to use it. Based originally on the Ordnance Survey, by permission, it is now kept up to date by its own service of information and is generally acknowledged the most up-to-date of any map in the country".

These maps didn't carry a date, but judging by the text on the cover ("By appointment to the Late King George V"), it has to date from later than 1936, and as it shows the railway line from Bourne End to High Wycombe, it presumably dates from before 1970, when that line closed.

I've also been looking at details of various Bartholomew design changes here. As far as I can make out from the index of sheets it was based on a layout that was used from 1940 onwards, and the cover design seems to date from before 1963. Judging by the original cover price (2/6), it dates from the early 1950's. However, it shows the Maidenhead bypass as being under construction. That became the first section of the M4 in 1963. So perhaps it actually dates from nearer then.

Beneath the map is this note:

"The publishers record their appreciation of the valuable services rendered in th past by map users un assisting to maintain the accuracy of this series and are always pleased to acknowledge any corrections brought to their notice".

I guess it's probably too late to let them know about Beeching, the construction of the M4 and M40, or that there are no longer Youth Hostels in Maidenhead, Henley, Beaconsfield / Chalfont St Peter, and Lane End. Instead (if only there was an agreed tagging scheme) we could all be out there adding abandoned Youth Hostels to OSM.

These days, of course, a fifty-year-old map is of no practical use whatsoever, but it is a thing of beauty nevertheless.

Henley on Thames cloned by Google

2011-06-10T19:49:00.000+01:00

View Larger Map

A modest proposal

2011-06-05T16:22:00.001+01:00

As to the number of persons in charge of a locomotive propelled by steam, or any other than animal power to be used on any public highway. It shall not be lawful for any owner of such locomotive, either in his own person or by his servants, to use any such locomotive, wagon, or carriage on the turnpike or other roads, except there be at the least three persons to drive or conduct such locomotive: one to steer, one to stoke, and one to proceed sixty yards ahead with a red flag to alert those in control of horses of the imminent approach of the vehicle.

Elliot 803

2011-06-01T10:30:00.008+01:00

This is a video of an Elliott 803 computer. It's the first machine I ever wrote a programme for. The whole thing was the size of a room. The only input and output devices used five-column paper tape.

We prepared our programmes on teletype machines. Then we used little switches on the console to boot the machine with the Algol compiler, and read our programmes in. I remember them as toggle switches, but they seem to be buttons here, so I must have got that muddled.

After a while the machine punched out another reel of paper tape containing the executable programme that it had generated. We rebooted again with the little switches to load the executable, and waited for the results.

My most successful programme generated solution to "Seven Bridges of Königsberg" type of problems, which it output as yet another reel of paper tape. That went into a pen plotter for the final result. It's (more or less) a standard routing problem, and the algorithm I used was pretty crude, but I was very proud of it at the time. Somewhere I think I still have the listing and paper tape, but years ago when I took another look at it I realised that there was a bug that my test cases hadn't picked up. I was gutted.

This must have been in the late 60's. I was still at school, and immensely lucky in those days and at that age, to have access to this technology. Happy memories, but things have moved on a little since then. It's amazing how evocative the various sounds are.

I hadn't realised that they had one working at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park. I must plan a visit.

Trying to be helpful, but...

2011-05-29T22:04:00.005+01:00

On this afternoon's outing I met a group of cyclists riding the Sustrans Thames Valley route from Hampton Court, then planning to get a train back from Henley. They must have covered about 25 miles at the point we met, and they still had about 8 miles to go. They had stopped at a point where the Sustrans map is a bit vague. I know the route well, and it wasn't difficult to point them in the right direction.

We then got to discussing the next couple of stages of their ride.

After crossing some fields, and following some minor lanes, the Sustrans route then follows a woodland path, over a hill. It's a nice ride, but a bit steep and heavy going. It's OK for mountain bikes, I guess, and sometimes I've taken that route, but normally I bypass it and take the flatter road.

After that they would need to get off the Sustrans route to reach Henley station. The two obvious options both involve minor A-roads. Neither is great for cycling, but the one they were planning to take is quite narrow, with a few blind corners. I prefer the other. Although it is busier, there is more space, so I find the traffic less of a problem. An even better option is to take a longer route down a little side lane and along the river. I'm not sure what the official position is on cycling along that part of the riverside path, but people do, and it's a nice ride.

Proud of my local knowledge, I blurted all this out without thinking it through, then realised that I'd probably caused more trouble than I'd saved.

Some of the group were prepared to admit that they were getting tired, others were still up for more of a challenge. A couple were in favour of switching to the easier route, others preferred to stick with their original plan. I'm sure they will have sorted it all out, but having thoughtlessly caused confusion it seemed best to retreat and leave them to it. Next time I'll try to engage my brain before opening my mouth.

Google correlate

2011-05-26T22:46:00.000+01:00

I'm not at all sure what this means, but it's a fun time waster.

The topics that correlate with cycling are obvious enough. And since this activity is so seasonal, it's not a great surprise that skiing crops up when the data is shifted by six months.

But it completely defeats me where this lot comes from on the correlation with oenstreetmap.

Is this a disused pub, or isn't it?

2011-05-18T14:45:00.006+01:00

I regularly ride past this closed pub on my "flat but quiet" 15 mile cycling loop. It strikes me as an attractive building, but a sad sight, and it seems to be on the market for redevelopment. I've not stopped to read the notices, but I assume there is planning permission for a change of use.

The other pub in the same village is now owned by a group of villagers, and seems to be thriving. It's odd how I will pass these things for months before it occurs to me to check whether they are recorded properly on the map. Having checked, I've added the open pub (which was missing), and changed the tagging on this one to show it as disused.

This leads on to the controversy about how best to tag features that are no longer in use. I've decided to mark this one as "amenity=pub, disused=yes", which is one of the common approaches. But that's not the only option, and there are good arguments against the approach I used.

For those who don't follow this stuff, the main problem is that it's as though I'm saying "this is a pub - oh not it's not". Anyone who is very thirsty might stop listening after the first half of the sentence. If I'd said "this WAS a pub" it would be OK. Similarly, somebody who is using the raw data to draw pubs on a map, or provide directions to the nearest pub is normally going to search for things described as a "pub". They will find more than 30,000 in the UK, including this one (unless they listen carefully).

What they probably want to find is pubs that are still in business. So they want to ignore the 70 or so that are already marked as "disused", and a few more that are marked as "closed". They will have to eliminate these explicitly. There are also more than 100 features described as a pub where the name is set to something like "Royal Oak (closed)". There are a few dozen more where there is a note attached (in free text) to the same effect. There are also a variety of less standard ways of indicating the same thing - all against features that are basically marked as being a "pub". The more of these that they handle explicitly, the more accurate their data will be. Any they miss can mislead their users.

The main alternative is to describe these things, not as a "pub", but as a "former pub", "disused pub" or even "dead pub". There are several dozen examples of each of these in the OSM data for the UK. The general approach is fairly common, but the actual values that are used tend to vary quite a bit. This approach has the advantage that none of these will match a simple search just for "pub". So the default behaviour of any software that uses the data is going to be what we would expect most people to intend. On the other hand, if they are mainly interested in pubs that are closed, or all pubs whether they are closed or not, then this data is not going to be a lot of help.

So given the choice, why did I chose to mark this is "amenity=pub, disused=yes", rather than "building=disused_pub" or something similar?

Partly it's because there is a well-established scheme for tagging pubs, and another well-established scheme for tagging things that are disused. Sticking to these keeps the data fairly clean.

I'm also a bit suspicious of advocating ways of tagging that make assumptions about how the data is going to be processed. Who is to say that it is most important to make life easy for people who want to identify active pubs? It's the obvious case, but what about people who are interested in pub history, pub architecture, the number of closed pubs. Or, in checking data quality against some external directory. Or (perhaps more likely) giving directions such as "turn left at the Royal Oak".

I reckon that anyone who seriously wants to extract active pubs from the database is going to find it fairly easy to filter out ones that are disused, as long as the tagging follows some basic principles. And if anyone thinks it is going to be too difficult to ignore features tagged as "disused=yes" then they should expect much bigger problems handling the other variants.

But mainly I've tagged it this way because that's what I see as I am riding past. From a distance I spot a pub, and when I get close I realise that it's disused. Once it has been developed it may look different, but for now, that's what it seems like to me.

As the OSM database gets more rich, and more detailed, and covers a wider variety of objects there are a number of areas where contributors need different forms of tagging to describe subtle differences between similar features. They already have access to a number of different idioms that they can use to express their different perceptions.

Some people have a problem with that. They want to drive out subjectivity by defining explicit data structures in great detail. In some areas this is probably the right approach. Consistency can sometimes be more important than other considerations. But in many areas a more subjective and expressive approach can (and in my view, should) be encouraged.

The arguments for avoiding forms such as "amenity=pub, disused=yes" are understandable, but as a contributor it has the advantage of being easy to understand, and apply in different situations. The form is already widely used. Most importantly it expresses what I see better than the alternatives. Although alternatives are also widely used, they lack the level of consistency that some potential users of the data may need.

This isn't a problem just for pubs, of course. Similar issues arise in OSM with abandoned railway stations, canals, and other amenities.

Nor is it a problem unique to Open Street Map. In the same village there's a house with a painted sign outside that says something like "Church House, Formerly All Saints Church, Now a Private Residence". I wonder why they went to the expense of putting that up?

"Vote early, vote often"

2011-05-16T21:45:00.006+01:00

Once again my local authority is inviting us to vote on how to spend some of the money. In last year's participative budgeting exercise investment in the cycling infrastructure came top of the vote, and this year we have the opportunity to put it top of the list again.

This is basically a repeat of last year's exercise, wth some tweaking.

There's more detail on this year's survey here.

I imagine that among the readers of this are some who would be keen to support investment in cycling infrastructure, but find themselves living outside this area. It would, of course, be wrong for anyone who lives elsewhere to try to influence priorities in this area by completing the online voting form (which can be found here).

It would also be deeply irresponsible of me to encourage such cynical behaviour. So I wont, but I can't prevent it happening. More importantly, it doesn't look as though the local authority has put anything in place to prevent outsiders from hijacking this survey. That seems remarkably trusting for a body that is in danger of looking highly cynical. For example, this year's total allocation for cycling has been cut by 20%, and split so that a large part of it is only relevant to a small proportion of the population. The core element is about half what it was last year. Cycling infrastructure is now almost entirely dependent on an annual participative budgeting exercise, rather than any sort of strategic commitment. And as far as I can make out, the participative budget was originally partly funded by slashing the cycling infrastructure budget.

Ultimately it's all a matter of priorities, of course. The way this is set up, cycling infrastructure is competing for resources against highways maintenance, pavement repairs and maintenance, street cleaning and litter removal, improved street lighting, improved parking facilities, winter maintenance, upgrading street furniture, tree planting, and facilities for young people (such as healthy eating/gardening projects and a vehicle safety/maintenance scheme).

Some might think that most of those sound like a pretty basic list of local authority responsibilities, rather than optional extras. But these are tough times, and difficult decisions have to be made. Available funds have to be spread thinly. Not least because they cut council tax by 4% last year, and a further 0.5% this year. Which makes a lot of sense if you think that the most needy people own the biggest houses.

I find all this difficult to understand, but their approach to priorities seems to be popular. The recent local government elections pretty much wiped out the opposition parties on the local council.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" H. L. Mencken. Or as they say these days "You're all in this together".

Babel

2011-05-07T19:47:00.000+01:00

I've just discovered that there are renders of Open Street Map in Welsh (here), in Scottish Gaelic (here) and in Irish Gaelic (here). I don't speak any of these languages, so none of them is going to be much use to me. Just the same, I'm pleased they are out there.

Nudge

2011-05-02T12:14:00.000+01:00

There are parts of the OSM database where it is important that contributors take a disciplined approach to the way that subjects are tagged. Data that is used to support subsequent processing will often only be usable if contributors stick to a relatively closed set of keys and values, and clearly understand their meaning.

Those responsible for the major renders and routing engines rely on sharing a common understanding with contributors in order to use the data they contribute. Contributors rely on sharing an understanding with the renderer if they are to see the results of their work. Hence both data contributors and those who use the data rely heavily on certain tags being well-documented with a closed set of options, that are applied reasonably consistently.

However, it seems to me that there are also some areas where a more open and expressive approach is appropriate. The database contains a mass of information contributed by different groups with different interests, and it needs to provide some space for them to explore and share ideas. In some areas a more flexible approach should encourage more creative and expressive contributions. On the other hand there are areas where there is too much diversity, and a greater degree of consistency would allow data to be used more widely. Neither is easy to achieve, and maintaining a balance between allowing complete anarchy and enforcing a highly structured approach is not easy. There is no single answer, but despite the difficulties, the OSM community has (so far) proved remarkably resilient and effective in keeping enough of a balance to maintain forward momentum.

I suspect that by their nature the most committed contributors to OSM have a leaning towards more structured processes, and higher levels of standardisation. Unfortunately these tendencies can encourage a style in the wiki that is sometimes close to impenetrable, and can lead to authoritarian processes for policing the way some of these things are documented.

At the moment I am particularly exercised by the "historic" tag, which I've been trying to use in my rendering experiments. Although this tag is barely used in the major renders, it has been widely applied in the database. So presumably it is seen by a lot of contributors as having value. On the whole it is used quite consistently. However, the range of values in the database is wider than the closed set that is documented in the wiki. There are also several areas where related topics, such as a change of use, or the current status of an abandoned structure are recorded inconsistently.

Although the "historic" tag is of particular interest to me at the moment, it is just one example of similar issues that occur elsewhere. As the scope of OSM content expands, and the mix of contributors widens, it seems to me that there are likely to be a growing number of areas where consistency might better be maintained by communicating general principles, rather than trying to police usage of a limited number of options.

To my eye the current documentation seems to be heavily reliant on saying "you can only this tag with these values, and they have to mean this". That's a sensible model for "highway", but it's not so good for "historic". There are discussions on tagging all over the place, but only the most determined will be prepared to plough through it all, and the core documentation on the wiki is a bit thin on "here is a good way to express what you want to say", "most people have resolved this kind of problem in this way", "there are several different ways of doing this, but no agreement yet on which is best", "there has been a proposal on how to define this, but it has not yet been widely adopted". That kind of guidance isn't terribly sensible for the "highway" tag, but I think it sits comfortably with the way that "historic" (and several other tags) are being used at the present time.

I know I'm not the only one who finds some of the current approaches frustrating, but I'm not sure how best to help work towards a solution. Too much of the discussion of contentious issues is at the level of the playground, and some of the platforms where discussion is supposed to take place have become a joke. So what I've done instead is to start with a specific suggestion by proposing some changes to the way the "historic" tag is documented on the wiki - here.

Basically what this tries to suggest is a move towards providing guidelines on how to document historic subjects rather than (or in addition to..) providing a catalogue of values with a limited number of options. It's as much about the style of approach as the specific content.

Maybe I'm trying to address a problem that only exists in my imagination. On the other hand, it may be a widely recognised problem, but this solution is seen as inappropriate. Or maybe there's a better alternative. Or (who knows) perhaps this is a reasonable start that just needs some improving. I would welcome comments. If I am somewhere in the right area, then it's important not only to get feedback from those determined souls who try to police the wiki, but also from the more occasional OSM users who might just want to use it (such as those who sometimes arrive here). If you don't have, and don't want, a wiki account, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Round the hill

2011-04-30T18:04:00.002+01:00

A month ago the ITO OSM analysis was showing my local area as having reached 74% coverage. It ranked about half way up the list, with roughly equal numbers of other areas showing better and worse levels of coverage.

Checking out some of the inconsistencies has given me plenty of excuses for pleasant outings over the last month. Several bank holidays later we have just passed 90% coverage, and risen to rank three-quarters of the way up the table. About a quarter of local areas still have better coverage, and of course, several of them are also improving, so the bar is continually rising.

That still leaves a gap of 10% to close, and some of the remaining inconsistencies are a bit of a puzzle. This is one. With that sign, the OSM name tag on the road was previously set as "Knowl Hill Common (Round the Hill)". I'm not sure, but I think it might have been my contribution in the first place. It certainly seems a reasonable interpretation to me.

However, on OS Streetview this road is named "Knowl Hill Common". A cursory search of the internet suggests that local addresses also tend to prefer "Knowl Hill Common". On the ITO analysis, half of the road was highlighted as inconsistent, and the other half wasn't.

After mulling this over (note to self: must get a life), I decided to change the name tag on OSM to "Knowl Hill Common", with an alt_name tag of "Round the Hill".

Of course the beauty of all this is that anyone who feels strongly, or has better local knowledge. can always change it back, or change it to something different. The location is here.

At the same time, and again thanks to ITO, I've uncovered a couple more named roads that I'd previously missed, despite having ridden past them regularly for the last three years. I can't believe there are so many of these bits and pieces that I hadn't noticed before, but in my defence, both of these look a bit like private driveways from the road. Closer scrutiny on the ground shows that they do have real names, and both are now fixed.

And finally, to my relief, I've managed to fix a mess that I made of one of islands in the Thames. I screwed up one of the riverbank multi-polygons last night. I realised shortly after that this had drained a short section of the river upstream from Windsor. It wasn't a difficult mistake to fix, but it was a bit of an uncomfortable wait before the solution was rendered again. All seems to be well now.

Onward and upward.

Somebody tried to steal my old bike last week

2011-04-30T16:40:00.006+01:00

We only have room in the shed for one bike, and the space is taken by the touring bike that I got last year. My older hybrid used to live in the shed, but now it hangs on a rack round the side of the house. It's outside, but protected from the worst of the weather, and secured by a padlock and wire cable.

On Friday morning we discovered that overnight somebody had removed the cover, and lifted the bike off the rack. However, they must have been deterred by the lock, and the bike was still there, lying on the ground.

The bike wasn't visible from the street, and we are tucked away on a side road, out of the way of passing traffic. So it's a mystery what anyone was doing at the back of the house in the first place. Presumably they had come over the garden fence looking for a short-cut, seen the bike, and thought "I'll have that", before realising it was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

We keep the second bike for visitors, and I use it occasionally - such as when my main bike was in the shop for repairs. Most of the time it just hangs there gathering cobwebs. That seems a shame, so rather than just putting it straight back, I've cleaned it up today, checked it over, pumped up the tyres and taken it for a ride. It's the first time it's been out in months. After more than a year using a new bike the differences in the ride were obvious straight away, but it made a change, and I soon adapted. I'm probably kidding myself, but when I clean a bike I can usually convince myself that it is running particularly nicely.

I went a few miles out to Knowl Hill, looking for a few things that I knew need fixing on the OSM map, but more of that shortly. In the meantime I might not have made best use of both bikes over the last year, but I'm glad that I still have the option.

Wedding present

2011-04-29T14:01:00.005+01:00

The spectacle has been impressive, but the coverage is becoming too much to bear.

Nevertheless, who could do anything other than wish the couple well? So I spent a bit of this morning creating a wedding present for them.

This maps the loyalty of the nation, according to the proportion of street names with royal connections. On the chart, yellow presents a high proportion of royal street names, and red represents a low proportion.

The most popular examples of street names with royal connections include Victoria Road, King Street, Queen Street, and various other combinations of Victoria (...Street, ...Park, ...Avenue). Princess Road and Princess Street come next, ranking seventh and eighth by total length. Together these eight names account for about half of street names with royal connections. King Edward Road ranks ninth, Queen Elizabeth Way ranks tenth, and Prince of Wales Road ranks eleventh by total length.

Altogether royal street names account for about 0.05% of the total.
The highest proportions are in the City of London and Denbighshire. The lowest proportions are in Harrow and Peterborough.

The street name data came from the OSM database, and the boundaries from Ordnance Survey. Postgresql, Postgis, Open Office and Quantum GIS did the heavy lifting.

Sustrans FAQ

2011-04-25T01:04:00.001+01:00

Sustrans are great, but their online mapping isn't, and this FAQ response doesn't make sense to me....

Why don't Sustrans use Google Maps or OpenStreetMap?

A Google or OpenStreetMap API (a map that can sit within another web page) re-loads the data attached to it each time you move or zoom the map. Our dataset is over 80Mb so this would run very slowly.

We use Ordnance Survey 1:10 000 and 1:25 000 scale maps as our backgrounds for several reasons:

They are based on the same map product and so will match up with each other at each zoom level. This means that routes will appear correctly against the different backgrounds. For example, a route plotted down one side of a carriageway against the 1:25 000 will appear on the same side of the carriageway when viewed against the 1:10 000 background.

Google mapping is not consistently detailed enough in all areas of the country for our needs. Also areas of shadow created, for example by tree-lined lanes, can obscure important information for cyclists and walkers. We believe that Ordnance Survey backgrounds give much better detail in both rural and urban areas.

From http://www.sustrans.org.uk/about-sustrans/faqs

Which councils chose the most boring street names?

2011-04-24T21:51:00.004+01:00

The widest variety of different street names is to be found in central London. Manchester, Scottish cities, and some English ports also show quite a lot of variety in their choice of street names. The least interesting mix of names tends to be found in rural counties to the east of England. East and North Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire all have a high proportion of common names, and use little variety in naming the rest of their network.

The bottom line is that the most interesting names are in Islington, and Kensington & Chelsea. Norfolk must try harder.

Allowing a bit of slack for spelling variations and tagging errors, the OSM database holds well over 250,000 different street names across the whole of the UK network. But some are more common than others. Only 25 of the most popular street names account for almost 5% of the named network.

"Station Road" and "High Street" are the most popular names. These represent respectively just over, and just under 0.5% of the total. "Church Road", "Church Lane", "Main Street", "Mill Lane", and "London Road" are also among the 25 most conventional names. However, the pattern is not consistent. In parts of London and Scotland the most common names account for less than 1% of the network; while in other parts of the country the 25 most common names account for almost 10% of the named road network.

Outside the most common names, the bigger authorities tend to use a wider variety of names - as one would expect because they operate bigger road networks. The big counties, like Kent, Essex, Lancashire and Hampshire each uses more than 1,000 distinct street names. On the other hand island councils such as Orkney, Shetland, Western Idles, and Anglesey; and smaller authorities on the mainland use a much smaller number of different names. Adjusting for the size of each road network, central London boroughs, and some cities, such as Stoke, Manchester, Bristol, and Derby each use a wide variety of different street names in proportion to their size, while shire counties generally show less variety.

The local authorities with the highest proportion of roads using common street names are:

East Riding of Yorkshire
Norfolk
Moray
Bedford
Lincolnshire

The local authorities with the lowest proportion of roads using common street names are:

Lewisham
Western Isles
Islington
City of Westminster
Kensington and Chelsea

The local authorities with the most diverse mix of different street names are:

City of London
Tower Hamlets
Stoke-on-Trent
Islington
Kensington and Chelsea

The local authorities with the least diverse mix of different street names are:

Norfolk
North Yorkshire
Lincolnshire
Western Isles
Orkney Islands

And as exercises in unnecessary and meaningless statistics go, I reckon all that will take some beating.

More dreadful weather for armchair mapping

2011-04-23T15:51:00.001+01:00

The weather is glorious again today, so I set out early and took the scenic route to Windsor. I pootled around Dedworth for a while writing down some of the street names that are missing or incorrect on OSM, so I could add them when I got home. Then I rode back through Bray, with a stop at Boulter's lock where I treated myself to an ice cream and watched the boats for a while.

Dedworth is a suburb of Windsor, which happens to lie between some of my regular rides. It had quite a few missing street names, and it's a reasonable distance for a ride of a couple of hours. Those are the reasons I picked it out, not because I had a burning desire to visit Dedworth. It seems to be made up of a series of developments that mostly date from the 1930's to the 1970's. For example, here's a Pathé news clip about some self-build activity here in the 1950's.

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While I was updating the OSM data I started to get curious about some of the street names, which are a bit unusual. It turns out that Dedworth has Saxon origins, and predates Windsor. Although the housing is relatively modern, they have used some names with historical associations. Examples I logged today include "Filmer Road" (Filmer was one of the Windsor Martyrs, burned at the stake for heresy in 1543), "Frymley View" (Frymley was a 16th century mayor of Windsor) and "Surly Hall Walk" (Surly Hall was a local inn, used by pupils at Eton). I also added names to some cul-de-sacs off Gallys Road, which is named after the landlord of the Garter Inn, who appears in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor.

The history of Dedworth: not as boring as I thought.

Traffic delays

2011-04-22T21:02:00.002+01:00

I've ridden past this sign a few times.

Spotting it out of the corner of my eye, I thought it read:

Traffic delays
Likely road rage in this area
Good Friday
9am - Noon

So I stopped to take a picture, and was disappointed to realise my mistake.

"Another unnecessary report showing meaningless statistics"

2011-04-22T09:22:00.006+01:00

Around here we can claim the highest proportion in England of children who are taken to school in cars. 46% of children usually travel to school by car, compared to a national average of 28%.

When these figures were published in January the local paper asked whether this meant the town's children were lazy and described them as "cosseted". The council, on the other hand, described the figures as "another unnecessary report showing meaningless statistics" (I think we can assume that they found it embarrassing).

I don't normally cycle at the peak times for travel to and from school. But whenever I cross a school route at other times my impression is that provision of traffic-free cycle paths isn't too bad. I had assumed that they just weren't being used very much.

However, looking at the figures more carefully, it's not the proportion of pupils who cycle that should be of most concern. Around here it's the proportion of pupils that walk or use public transport that are well below the national averages. The proportion who cycle to school isn't as bad as I had expected. It may only be 4% of all pupils, and that leaves plenty of scope for improvement. But to keep things in perspective, 4% cycling to school around here compares to only 2% nationally, and 3% across the South-East.

It's ironic, of course, that the main reason that parents accompany their children to school is fear of traffic, and that cars taking children to school represent more than 20% of that traffic at peak times in urban areas. And those are national figures for all urban areas. I don't know what the local figures are, but an awful lot of the traffic that is seen as posing a risk to pupils on their way to and from school must be on the road because it is taking part in the school run.

The figures are on the DfT site. Here for the National Travel Survey and here for the School Travel Statistics. They relate to 2009, but I suspect these might be the last government figures that we see on this subject for a while.

Frightening the elderly

2011-04-21T18:44:00.001+01:00

View Larger Map

I rode down this shared-use path this morning. It leads to a pedestrian crossing, where I rejoin the main road, at a short section of cycle lane. This is a bit of a tricky junction for both cyclists and drivers, and in the past I've thought of this shared path as a handy way to keep out of the way of traffic. Presumably that's why it is there.

Normally there's nothing very remarkable about any of this, but this morning, as I approached the pedestrian crossing there was a rather frail elderly lady approaching it from the opposite direction. Seeing me riding (slowly) towards her she looked absolutely terrified, and froze on the spot until I was back on the road again.

I should probably mention that I was moving at about walking pace, and I was some distance away from her.

She was using a stick, and she didn't look altogether steady, so it is perfectly natural that she would be cautious. But the frightened expression on her face went far beyond what I would expect from somebody who is feeling a bit vulnerable. I stopped, tried to make it clear that I wasn't heading in her direction, and moved off slowly while she remained frozen. Perhaps I should have called out something friendly, but that could have made things worse.

I have no idea, of course, what was worrying her. I don't think I look any more scary than any other (late) middle-aged man wearing a cycling helmet. Maybe she has had a bad experience in the past. This junction is at the bottom of a hill, and it's perfectly possible that somebody has ridden too quickly around the corner and given her a fright. It may just be that she has seen some of the recent press coverage about dangerous cyclists.

Whatever the reason, she has given me pause for thought.

I don't often use shared footpaths. If there are any pedestrians around it's normally easier all round if I keep out of their way. On the other hand, there are places where separating cyclists and cars can also make life easier for both. In places like that I will use a shared path, carefully.

However, it's not difficult to choose between scaring the elderly on a shared footpath, or forcing cars to travel briefly at my speed on the road.

Hawthorn hedge

2011-04-21T15:14:00.001+01:00

Somebody has made a lovely job of relaying this hedge near Shottesbrooke. There is a limited amount of blossom starting to appear. I don't know whether I should expect an abundance this year, but already it's a treat to see the foliage flourishing each time I ride past.

Physics of the riderless bike

2011-04-17T19:45:00.000+01:00

This is a return to a topic that I've touched on before, and I'm not sure that I'm any wiser this time, but it's a nice little film.

Thanks to Ben Goldacre for the link.

Talatat

2011-04-13T10:36:00.004+01:00

"Talatat are stone blocks of standardized size (ca. 27 by 27 by 54 cm, corresponding to ½ by ½ by 1 ancient Egyptian cubits) used during the reign of Akhenaton in the building of the Aton temples at Karnak and Akhetaten.

The standardized size and their small weight made construction more efficient. Their use may have begun in the second year of Akhenton's reign. After the Amarna Period talatat construction was abandoned, apparently not having withstood the test of time."

I came across that by accident, after mistyping "Tlatet" in a search. It comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talatat. But it chimes with something else that I've been mulling over recently.

My programming career started in the days when tools were much less sophisticated, and much less reliable than they are these days. The move from "spaghetti code" to "structured" programming was under way. We were being encouraged to use procedures more, and avoid "goto". But while objects, declarative programming and the like may have been around in academic circles, they hadn't reached the coal face. The big and clever tools weren't as big and clever as they thought they were. It was always helpful to stay close to the underlying components so that when things went awry you could usually figure out why.

I earned my crust programming for a few years, then moved onto other things. By that time things were starting to change, and I've learned about subsequent developments out of interest, rather than for professional reasons.

The point of all this is that since my formative years of programming I've always been more comfortable when I can see how the cogs turn. I'm hugely impressed at the level of sophistication that open software is achieving, and I enjoy learning how to take advantage of it. But often I feel as though I'm dropping things into a "black box" then waiting for the results to appear. When things don't go the way that I expect, I'm inclined to open the box up, take it apart and examine the workings. Normally it turns out that my instinctive approach isn't practical. I know I could get hold of the underlying code, and that's a big advantage over proprietary software. But in practice there's a huge drop down from today's high level of sophistication, to the mass of minute detail that undepins it.

I'm suppose I'm hankering after being able to muck around with building blocks that are smaller than the major software tools, but bigger than the underlying code. We might call them "Talatat". But it seems that they didn't stand the test of time either.

Windermere refilled

2011-04-12T21:22:00.002+01:00

Having tidied up the data, tweaked the rendering, and speeded up the whole process I finally got round to regenerating my 1/2" maps, only to discover that Lake Windermere had disappeared. Refilling it has taken a while.

Generating the foreshore from Ordnance Survey VectorMap District was a bit fiddly, but a lot more straightforward, and I think the result is worthwhile. Thanks, Chris for pointing me in the right direction.

There are two more examples here and here.

Cycle infrastructure tagging

2011-04-11T22:53:00.009+01:00

My first attempt at using Mapnik to produce a version of the old 1/2" maps was a bit of a bodge. Learning what was possible involved a lot of trial and nearly as much error. In the end I created something that was vaguely like what I'd intended. Now I'm in the process of rebuilding it all in a more organised way.

The rebuild is going reasonably well. I've got better source data, and discovered and fixed some errors that crept in last time round. I've achieved some worthwhile performance improvements and brought the processing time down from a few days to a lot of hours. At the same time I'm tweaking how the result looks.

As part of the whole process I'm trying to find more effective ways of capturing different tagging variations. For example, to find cycling infrastructure I search for various combinations of "highway=cycleway", "cycleway=something", "bicycle=yes", "ncn, rcn, lcn, ncn_ref, rcn_ref, or lcn_ref=something" and "route=bicycle". I currently find about 44,000km of UK cycling infrastructure with those combinations. By way of comparison, Sustrans say that their national and regional network is 12,600 miles (i.e. just over 20,000km) in length. The rest of what I'm finding is made up of local networks, and cycling stuff that doesn't form part of a network.

I end up plotting this at 1/2" to the mile - so there isn't scope for a lot of complication in the way I plot the different options. At the moment I'm characterising all of the different types of cycle path as either "on-road" or "off-road". It turns out that I classify 53% as being on-road. The way I've set things up, that effectively includes primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, residential, and other roads that are marked with a cycle-related tag of some kind. I'm classifying the other 47% as being off-road. Of the network that I capture about 3% fails to give any indication of the type of road or path, and I've assumed all of those are off-road.

All of these figures are UK only (more or less - the bounding box overlaps some other countries slightly), and I pulled the data at the beginning of April.

Looking first at the on-road element of the cycle network, only 1% is on roads that mappers haven't classified yet (i.e. highway=road). 8% is on a primary road (plus another 3% on a trunk road). 12% is on a secondary road. The way that lesser roads are classified can be a bit arbitrary, but according to OSM mappers, almost half (46%) of the UK on-road cycle network is on an unclassified road, 20% on a tertiary road, and 8% on a residential road. That leaves 2% on service roads, and a very little bit on different types of link-road.

Elsewhere, six tags account for 93% of the off-road network. The most popular is "cycleway" (almost half of the off-road network). "Bridleway" accounts for 16%, "track" for 11% and "footway" for 10%. The only other common tags are "path" (4%) and "byway" (3%). Among the less common tags we find "pedestrian" and "unsurfaced". "Steps" occurs a couple of hundred times, but doesn't account for much of the network length. More rare tags include "construction", "proposed", "living_street", "crossing", and some combinations of the above.

For obvious reasons I can't measure how much of the cycling infrastructure I'm missing. There must be some, but I've not spotted any obvious gaps with my improved process. Trying to measure the "unknown unknowns" is still on my list of things-to-do when I work out how. Of the infrastructure that I've managed to find, something like 96% is tagged in a way that I can understand. The other 4% are the "known unknowns" - I know they are cycling infrastructure but I'm not clever enough to do much else with them.

Leaving the unknowns aside, at first I found that the variety of information about the rest was a bit daunting. There was a stage where I would spot an apparent gap in the network, and discover that it was tagged with a variation that I hadn't thought to include. I started leaning towards the school of thought that somebody needs to get a grip on standardising the tagging scheme, so that we don't clutter things up with too many variations.

Now that I've got myself a bit more organised, I'm much more relaxed about all that. There aren't too many variations in general use. The different tags that are used widely reflect different characteristics of the infrastructure design ("Highway=cycleway", or "Cycleway=something"), the way it can be used ("Bicycle=yes") or the network that connects the bits together ("NCN", "RCN", "LCN"). I'm much more inclined now to the view that the benefit of capturing that rich variety with flexible tagging is far more important than the inconvenience of having to handle some of the more obscure variations.

Dreadful weather for armchair mapping

2011-04-09T18:30:00.005+01:00

"Completeness" is a bit of a moving target when it comes to Open Street Map, but I don't suppose that I'm the only person who wants to see some sort of completeness in the content that matters to me. At the moment what that means in practice is that I would like to see an end to the coloured splodges that show up on the ITO analysis of my local area.

Like others, I've been steadily nibbling away at the missing roads, and the analysis is slowly turning monochrome, but unlike the most organised parts of the country, around here there is still plenty to do.

Because I'm keen to clear up the discrepancies there's quite a strong temptation to take the easy way out, and fix things without getting out there and taking a look. In some cases that seems to be the sensible approach. There doesn't seem much point in taking a round trip of a few miles to check that it's OK to change a name from "Abbreviation Rd" to "Abbreviation Road". Or to make sure that the right name is "Spelling Avenue", not "Sppelling Avenue".

On the other hand, without taking a look it would be easy to miss some of the genuine inconsistencies between the OS data, and what can be found on the ground. So I try to resist the temptation to do too much from the armchair. I try to keep a sensible balance between fixing things the quick and easy way when the reality of the situation is pretty obvious; or going to take a look myself when there is some doubt.

This morning was a lovely day. As a result the balance swung strongly in favour of getting the bike out and riding out to take a look around. The area I decided to cover was some suburban housing to the west of Windsor. It's not the most interesting destination, but there were quite a lot of coloured splodges in a small area that lies just off one of the routes that I regularly take purely for nice ride. On a loop of about 20 miles I managed to fix about a dozen road names, as well as enjoying a very pleasant ride out there and back.

Most (if not all) of the fixes could probably have been done easily without a visit - but what a waste of a fine day that would have been.

I'm still not sure what to do about discrepancies that are difficult to check - even with a visit. A number of those are either a country lane for which the OS has a name, but there doesn't seem to be any name displayed in situ. Or they occur where a road name changes, but it isn't clear exactly where.

I could assume that the OS knows what they are doing, and that the original tagging was wrong - and change the name accordingly. Or I could assume that the original tagging was based on local knowledge, and that the OS has got it wrong, and tag to suppress the error report. I suppose somebody will have a definitive answer, and I could try to research it - but that seems a bit over the top for short sections of insignificant roads. At the moment I am leaving cases like these for someone else to sort out.

So, someone else, whoever you are, the weather outside is lovely, and it's the perfect time to pull your finger out, and fix some of the stuff that I'm leaving. Until you do 100% "completeness" is going to be unachievable.

Cycle hire virgin no longer

2011-04-07T20:11:00.007+01:00

It's been a good day today. Not least because, at long last, and months after my key arrived, I've managed my first ride on one of the London hire bikes.

The weather was warm, and I needed to get from Holborn to Paddington. As someone who isn't used to riding in the middle of London, I bottled out of using the docking station on High Holborn because of the traffic. I had walked up to the British museum before I felt that I should stop being such a wimp.
I fumbled around a bit, but after a couple of false starts, the undocking process was straightforward enough.

I'm not exactly trailblazing here, so the ride itself was much as expected. My route finding to Paddington was a bit hit and miss, but by the time I arrived I felt I was coping OK with the traffic. It helped that nearly everything on the road (apart from a few fast cyclists) was moving at a slow pace, and my rather sedate progress didn't feel as out of place as it would around here.

I didn't remember to keep careful track of the time, but I think I got the bike docked within my free half hour, despite having to search a little bit for the Paddington docking station.

So if there is anyone else left who hasn't got round to trying them yet, the traffic isn't as scary as expected, they are not at all bad to ride, and the system is easy to use. They have my vote as a practical and fun way of covering a few miles across the middle of London. I still prefer not to think of them as B*r*s bikes though.

Holes

2011-04-05T20:35:00.001+01:00

When I was trying to produce contours for my homage to the old 1/2" maps I discovered that there are "holes" in the SRTM altitude data. The software I was using doesn't seem to handle them very well, and they produced some strange effects, but those were quite localised. As far as I can see, all the problems were well away from the main areas of the UK that I was working with. So I added this to the list of things that would be interesting to explore later, and I ignored them.

Then today I came across this on the Ordnance Survey blog.

It's about producing a list of holes in Britain, as an addition to the existing lists of mountain peaks such as the Munros. My immediate reaction was that this must be related to the same problem. It isn't of course, but the video was worth a view anyway.

"It's impossible to feel like a grown-up when you're on a bicycle"

2011-04-02T13:58:00.004+01:00

There's a wonderful article by P. J. O'rourke on the Wall Street Journal. Thanks to @carltonreid for the pointer.

Not everyone who has commented seems to realise that the author is a satirist. In other words, his job is to use irony and wit to expose human folly.

Like this:

"Bicycles are the perfect way to go nowhere while carrying nothing"
"The reason it took mankind 5,000 years to get the idea for the bicycle is that it was a bad idea"
"You can walk up three flights of stairs carrying one end of a sofa. Try that on a bicycle"
"You can't decrease traffic congestion by putting things in the way of traffic"

Those are jokes, not statements of his core beliefs.

I don't know whether P. J. O'Rourke cycles or not. I suspect he might. This isn't his first foray into similar territory. And when he says "It's impossible to feel like a grown-up when you're on a bicycle" he get pretty close to part of the appeal.

An interesting question

2011-03-29T22:53:00.006+01:00

Under this headline: EU plans to ban all petrol and diesel cars from cities to force drivers to go ‘green’ today's Daily Mail asks "Is the EU's proposed banning of petrol- and diesel-powered cars a realistic objective?"

You can vote either Yes or No - here.

Please don't bother to read the article - it doesn't bear much relation to the actual EU proposals, so it's better use of time to read the original EU document here.

It's all a bit turgid, but the general theme is straightforward: we largely take our freedom to travel and mobility for granted. Our lifestyles and our economy depend on it. However, long-term uncertainty about fuel supplies, environmental impacts and congestion mean that we are going to lose this freedom unless we do something. And there are a lot of things we can do like providing alternatives and encouraging people to use them. It helps to coordinate some of these activities internationally.

Those are hardly contentious ideas, but perhaps a shade too subtle for the Daily Mail to grasp.

The Daily Telegraph carried a similar article. That's not worth reading either, but it has been collecting an entertaining set of bizarre comments (well over 1,400 at present) here.

A l'eau - c'est l'heure

2011-03-29T12:52:00.003+01:00

Some of the old Bartholomew maps show a limited amount of information on the depth of the sea around the coast. For my first attempts at emulating this I just created a low-water line from the Ordnance Survey data for Local government Boundaries (which mainly extend to the low-water mark). It looked about right, but it seemed like a bit of a fiddle.

I thought I ought to be able to do better, so I set off to see what data I could find on the depth of the coastal waters around Britain. I found what I thought I wanted on the Emodnet site. And so began a long tortuous process of trying to understand how to get this data into a format that I could process and add to my rendering.

I'd used SRTM2OSM to calculate the land contours, because for those I was starting from SRTM data, and it seemed to be an easier solution than using GDAL. The Emodnet data isn't in the same format, so this all turned into a bit of an exercise in understanding different data formats, and how to convert and manipulate them using the GDAL toolset.

After a lot of effort I've ended up getting something working. The results aren't entirely convincing, but after a lot of false starts I've ended up a bit surprised that I could get anything at all produced.

The results for the Farne Islands, off the Northumberland coast, are shown above.

I've also rendered some larger versions covering more of the coast around Northumberland, and the South Lakes.

Meanwhile, back on land, I have also generated a map of my local area, up to the Chilterns. I've tried using an extract of this as a road map. It certainly has limitations, but it is usable, up to a point. Printing off extracts at 300dpi produces roughly the right scale for 1/2" to the mile. I don't think it would be wise to recommend any of these to a sailor though.

Some shared use paths

2011-03-27T22:07:00.004+01:00

I said last week that it was becoming rare to find things around here that I can add to the map while cycling. I was wrong.

Now that I've looked a bit harder there is quite a lot that I can add from a cycle. It's the ITO OSM analysis that opened my eyes to how much could still be done on the bike. I thought we were doing better around here, but my local authority area currently ranks as 74% coverage. That's better than about half of the local authorities analysed by ITO, but not as good as the other half.

Close to home there are a few minor inconsistencies, but on the whole things aren't too bad. There are more areas that need attention on the edge of Windsor and Ascot. Either is a nice distance away for a gentle couple of hours ride on a Sunday afternoon. So I extracted the ITO report, printed it off, left it on the printer (oops) and set off.

I headed first for Winkfield, where I knew there were a few gaps. Realising that I'd left the ITO report at home didn't exactly make things easy. So after a bit of a ride around, I set off for the centre of Windsor.

I don't often ride into Windsor from that side, but whenever I do it strikes me as being a bit of a strange ride. The first part looks like it should be quite a good road, but in reality it's not great. It's wide enough to encourage fast driving, but narrow enough to force cars to overtake very closely. After Legoland the road narrows, and drivers are faced with a slow crawl towards the town centre. Cyclists, though, gain access to a shared-use cycle path. My nasty side enjoys gliding past a queue of cars that have been rocketing past me earlier.

As I passed the queue of cars it dawned on me that I'd noticed a few shared-use cycle paths that don't appear on the map. So I traced the ones I found as I crossed Windsor. When I got home I found I was right. None of the ones I traced had already been added. They have now.

And for another day there is still a list on the printer of the inconsistencies that ITO have identified (if nobody else gets there first).

Look mother, no hands

2011-03-20T18:03:00.006Z

I started collecting data for OSM over three years ago - partly to encourage myself to overcome my natural inertia, and get out on the bike more. Inevitably I got hooked, and it all took on a bit of a life of its own. Over the last three years I've added a bit, but meanwhile an astonishing amount of detail has been accumulated around the area where I live. There are still things missing, but most of them would best be added on foot, not a bike. It has become quite rare to find things that I can trace while cycling.

I still need to get out on the bike though - if only to keep my personal Travel Time Budget in balance. So off I trundled to Eton and Windsor this afternoon, for a couple of hours easy riding on a fine day.

The route is familiar, and you don't expect many surprises on a pleasant Sunday afternoon in the Thames Valley, but I did find an area that hadn't been mapped. It's a residential caravan site, next to the river on the edge of Windsor. It's all very tidy, and pleasant, with more garden gnomes than you could shake a stick at. So I cycled round, logged the service roads on the GPS, and added it to the map when I got home.

The other memorable sight was watching somebody changing their T-shirt as they rode towards me. People riding without holding the handlebars always impress me, because I cannot do it (or at least not for more than a second or so, which doesn't count). But I've never seen anyone change their T-Shirt while riding before.

H. G. Wells famously said that when he saw somebody on a bicycle he did not despair for the human race. Well if the human race has evolved to the point where we can change our clothes at the same time as riding a bicycle we need have no fears. The next generation should be capable of anything.

Travel Time Budget

2011-03-19T17:04:00.008Z

For much of my working life I've spent an hour or so a day travelling to and from work. For a long time it was much worse - I used to spend several hours a day commuting. That was a bit of a pain, but it stopped more than ten years ago, when I moved to a job in Paris. Over there, the daily commute became much easier, because I lived close to the office, but every couple of weeks I would have a much longer journey back to the UK. Averaged over a month, I probably spent about the same amount of time travelling as I had in the UK.

My brother has just pointed out that it's possible that I have an innate need to spend an hour or so travelling each day. And so might you. It's all explained here.

On average, apparently, people spend about 1.1 hours per day on the move - regardless of their nationality, culture, economic system, or era. As travel has become faster they have tended to travel further - but the time that they spend travelling remains fairly constant.

Just over an hour a day comes to almost 8 hours a week. When I was spending more than twice that commuting it certainly felt like too much. These days I mostly work from home, and I doubt if I have to do more than a couple of hours travel in a normal working week. By the weekend that means I am falling short of my Travel Time Budget by about 6 hours. Which neatly explains why I enjoy spending one day of the weekend out on the bike. It seems that it's all part of some primeval need to balance time spent exploring with time spent hanging around the cave.

I've not been keeping count, but during the last week I probably spent less than an hour on necessary travel, then almost five hours today cycling (slowly) out to Christmas Common and back for fun. I followed the route that I tried to follow a few weeks ago, but this time I managed not to get lost. It was a lovely day for a ride - just a little bit of cold in the air and a slight wind, but clear and sunny, and lots of other riders out and about.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but more to the point, I am now only a couple of hours short of balancing my weekly Travel Time Budget, and tomorrow is another day.

Philately will get you nowhere

2011-03-17T21:09:00.003Z

We are doing a lot of sorting out at the moment, and in the process I came across my old stamp album. There are several pages that feature Colin Firth. This dates from the 1937 Coronation, where he appears alongside Helena Bonham Carter. Others cover the centenary of the first postage stamp in 1940, victory celebrations in 1946, the 1948 Olympic Games and the Festival of Britain in 1951.

This is how I laid out one of the pages.

The earliest stamps in the collection start at around 1934, with George V. It runs up to the mid-sixties, with a set of first day covers addressed in my teenage handwriting. By that time I was becoming interested in other things. I don't really remember, but I suspect that at about the same time as I stopped collecting stamps I also gave up cycling for about 40 years. Foolish boy.

Progress

2011-03-16T20:27:00.002Z

I'm still struggling with labeling roads and rivers, still losing some of the cycle paths, and there are numerous other things that need tidying and fixing.

This stuff certainly exercises the little grey cells.

On the other hand....

And while it was all churning away I managed to get out and cover about 20 miles on the bike to check out the real (316,800* inches to the mile) world.

*Oops, don't know where that came from - it should, of course be 12 inches times 3 feet times 1,760 yards = 63,360 inches to the mile. Thanks to Ed for pointing it out. No wonder I'm having so much trouble getting this stuff to work properly

Homage to John George Bartholomew

2011-03-13T22:25:00.006Z

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have a fondness for the old Bartholomew's 1/2" maps. It seems I am not alone. They haven't been published for over 30 years, so any we find in second-hand bookshops are hopelessly out of date. Even towards the end of their life they were beginning to get a reputation for being a bit unreliable. But back then apparently their fans were still so keen on them that they used to buy new Ordnance Survey maps so that they could transfer the details to their old Bartholomew's maps and continue to use them.

The obvious question is whether something similar could be produced today, using Open Street Map data. Naively I decided that I would try to find out, without really understanding what I was getting into.

There are some obvious differences between then and now. The basic design of the Bartholomew 1/2" dates back around a century, so they didn't have to cater for motorways. Road networks in towns are much more extensive these days than they were at that time. There have been changes in the type of information that is important now, compared to the information that was important then. They seem to label country estates, for example, and they used to mark Inns, but not Car Parks.

Apart from those changes, I've had to cope within my own limitations. I had created databases from OSM data before, so I know how to do that. I've become reasonably familiar with Postgis, and with some of the other tools that I needed. but I knew nothing about generating contour lines, and I hadn't used Mapnik until a week or so ago. There's a lot of useful information around, but it's been a steep learning process, and the old computer has been churning data for days on end.

I've made a start now, but there is still a lot that needs fixing. I haven't tried to get layers working yet, and I haven't put any labelling on the roads. Colours and icons could do with a lot of tuning, the scaling is only approximate (at 300dpi), it needs a legend, and copyright, and there's more detail to add. It only looks vaguely like the originals, and I'm not sure how much closer it can get.

Having said all that, I'm quite pleased with my first attempt. The basic mechanisms are up and running. I've learned a lot. Most of all, I've learned to respect the skills of the people who put the original Bartholomew's maps together at the end of the 19th century (and those who are putting together today's digital maps and tools).

There's a bigger example of how I am getting on, which covers a few square miles north-west of Maidenhead here. I've coloured the Motorways (blue), Trunk roads (green), Primary and Secondary roads (brown and yellow). Cycle routes are in Red, dashed if off-road, though I notice some are missing, which is something else to fix.

More routes

2011-03-08T16:17:00.006Z

We visited Barters second-hand bookshop in Alnwick a couple of weeks ago. They have a "Cycling and Extreme Sports" section. It's a daft category, but in it I discovered this CTC route guide from 1980 by Christa Gausden and Nicholas Crane. At the time they had worked in the CTC Touring Department. Nicholas Crane must then have been in his mid-twenties.

The book is thirty years old now. As evidenced by the 118 cyclists on the front cover it's somewhat dated. But then the same could be said of me, so I like it. It took quite a clever approach, and they carried it out well.

The nearest equivalent that I already had on the shelf is "Lonely Planet: Cycling Britain". Apart from being from different eras, the two books differ in their approach. The Lonely Planet Guide is constructed around 29 longish routes, each designed to take about a week. It describes these in some detail, with elevations, information on places to stay and other facilities, and suggestions of places to visit. The result is useful, and practical - if a bit prescriptive.

The CTC guide on the other hand, was constructed around 365 shorter rides. Most of these would take a day or less to cover. I suppose you could ride the whole lot in a year - if you were minded to. The sections join together, so the idea was that readers would arrange different elements to assemble a longer route which suited them. Maps show the different ways that sections interconnect, but the text only provides a limited amount of information on facilities and other local highlights.

Both books cover England Scotland and Wales. The Lonely Planet guide includes routes in Northern Ireland, but the old CTC guide covers the whole of Ireland.

For anyone that wanted a book to help plan a route in the UK today the Lonely Planet would be the obvious choice, but the old CTC guide offers an interesting alternative. The routes were tested thirty years ago by members of the Cyclist Touring Club, but the network of minor rural roads can't have changed that much over the last thirty years. So with a degree of checking against modern maps it should still have some value.

Locally the choices cover some of the routes that I have already discovered for myself, as well as some that I haven't (yet). Part of the appeal is that this way of constructing new trips out of bits of old ones is similar to the way that I plan my own outings: though in my case the different sections are all floating around in my memory, rather than being properly documented. I like the approach. I reckon it was worth a couple of quid, and it should be a useful addition to the shelf.

Bike touring, the new rules

2011-03-06T13:48:00.007Z

Each of the last couple of years I have taken a week out for an extended trip on the bike. Once along the Sustrans Coast and Castles route from Newcastle to Edinburgh, and once down the west coast of Scotland from Fort William, via Mull and Arran and back to Glasgow. I have thoroughly enjoyed both trips. In their own way each was a bit of an adventure, and a pleasant break from the normal routine. I have happy memories of glorious scenery, and lovely people.

It's the time of year when I start thinking about where to go next, and there is an article in today's Sunday Times about bike touring. I thought it might help. What a fool I am.

It turns out that I've been doing this all wrong.

Firstly, I'm told that nobody with an ounce of style would be seen dead on a pushbike with canvas panniers. Well I wasn't seen dead on the last two trips, and hopefully won't be this year either. But I was certainly seen on a pushbike with canvas panniers. I'm well aware that I don't have an ounce of style, and as far as I know, I never did have. Sometimes I accidentally find myself in a situation where that matters, but I try to avoid them as far as possible. But it had never occurred to me that it might matter on a cycle touring holiday. However, I now know that bike touring is being reinvented for new generation. It's all about extreme off-road adventure riding, which requires special equipment such ultra-light handmade panniers that are designed for the most demanding harcore riders.

What I did wrong	The Sunday Times alternative universe
Visit parts of the country that I think I will like, and which I can't easily reach from home on a shorter ride. Choose a route and a pace that I can happily cope with, and enjoy.	Undertake a challenge ride, where the rules are fairly relaxed. (Rules?!?)
Enjoy travelling at a speed where I could stop and look at things, leave time to take advantage of the unexpected, and have conversations with people I meet on the way	Ride 100 miles a day, and aim to set new records for distance and time.
Wear clothing that means I can happily cope with unpredictable weather, and even if I get a bit bedraggled, its no worse than when I set off.	Style is all important. At all costs avoid looking like a retired geography teacher.
Carry everything I need in ordinary, practical, canvas panniers, available from any local bike shop, or widely on t'interweb	Must have ultra-light hand-made panniers, that are almost impossible to obtain
Stay in cheap and comfortable B&B or convenient inns. Eat whatever local produce is available for lunch. Pack some nice chocolate to cheer myself up when things go awry.	Overnight in super-technical bivouacs. Don't eat cheese sandwiches. (Its not clear why this has become important, other than the fear of a journalist mocking).

Perhaps my best bet this year is to find the remote places where there will be nobody to laugh at my obvious lack of cool, or places that appeal to retired geography teachers where it seems I could fit in nicely. Any suggestions?

On the one hand this, on the other hand that

2011-03-03T18:14:00.011Z

In our local paper today there is a letter that supports the development of dedicated cycle lanes, on condition that cyclists are forced to use them. I suspect this is a fairly common view among road users who don't cycle. They see dedicated cycle lanes as a means of getting bicycles out of the way of cars.

That's not how cyclists see things though. Many are keen to see more cycle lanes because they want to encourage safer everyday cycling. Others oppose them on the basis that it is important to preserve the right to use ordinary roads. None (as far as I know) want them to be mandatory.

The debate can get heated, and I can see persuasive arguments from cyclists on both sides. Many people find busy roads frightening, and they have good cause. Letters such as this one show that there really is a need to defend the general right of everyone to use the roads.

It feels like one of those discussions that will never be resolved as matter of principle. When it comes to questions of how best to improve a specific stretch of road then I suspect that the issues are relatively straightforward, but when arguing about generalities, both sides have their point, and the debate will no doubt continue.

Sitting on the fence about the principle doesn't stop me disagreeing strongly with this particular letter though. Part of the writer's case is to (perfectly correctly) point out that some cyclists ride irresponsibly, and thoughtlessly. They are also right to point out that a cyclist using an ordinary road can slow down the traffic.

So much is unarguable - but so what?

Cyclists inconvenience car drivers. Car drivers inconvenience buses. Buses inconvenience lorries. Lorries inconvenience people riding horses. People riding horses inconvenience steam traction engines. Steam traction engines inconvenience white vans. White vans inconvenience cyclists. Come to that, some cars inconvenience other cars. And so on. We all share the roads, and I'm afraid we all just have to learn to live with others who share them as well.

Inconvenience has nothing to do with removing a general right to use the roads. Poor behaviour has nothing to do with deciding the best way to facilitate different types of road use.

The logic of the letter implies that decisions on the design of the transport network should be based on the levels of courtesy that different types of road user exhibit, and the level of inconvenience they cause. That seems a most peculiar view to me.

Apart from anything else, if it was pursued to its logical conclusion, I'm not sure that car drivers would fare very well. If I was to say "Some car drivers throw litter out of the window, and exceed the speed limit..." it would be true. And if I concluded "...therefore we should exclude all cars from the A4" it wouldn't quite come over as a rational argument.

Innertube

2011-03-01T18:18:00.002Z

We were away from home for a few days last week, and since we got back I've not been very organised, so I've only just got round to catching up on some of the emails that I missed. Among them was a link to the Edinburgh Innertube map, from The Bike Station.

It looks good, and I'm intrigued to know how such a different approach works out in practice.

I can imagine it being useful on some journeys for some cyclists. It doesn't show anything other than the cycle routes, which keeps things simple. So for anyone who knows where they want to get to, and has a rough idea of the street layout, then it certainly reduces things to the minimum. As long as each of the junctions is sufficiently well signed I can see it working quite well. Without knowing the area it's hard to judge though.

Apart from its practical use, this is also quite an unusual take on things. I can see something like this provoking people to take a fresh look at the routes they might be able to use. That in itself is no bad thing. It also seems to be gaining quite a lot of attention, so it must be helping the Bike Station to spread the word. No bad thing either.

The other thing that occurs to me is that, around here we seem to have quite a lot of bits of cycling infrastructure, but getting from A to B often involves finding a decent way of connecting them up. Something along these lines could be quite a good way of working out where there are gaps in the network.

Of course for general getting around, there is always the usual alternative to fall back on, along with increasingly sophisticated support for journey planning. OSM has a reputation for being particularly thorough in its coverage of Edinburgh, and I suspect that if I was trying to find my way around up there then it would still be my preferred choice. It's always nice to see some different thinking though.

Bartholomew's maps

2011-02-16T23:08:00.006Z

My parents used the post-war Bartholomew's 1/2" road maps, and I probably learned most of my map-reading skills* by navigating with them as my father drove. I don't think we have any of them at home these days, but I remember them well, and still see plenty in second-hand bookshops.

They are hopelessly out of date now of course, and of little practical use. But they are very colourful. I always liked the robust way they were mounted on fabric, and I still find them attractive in their own right.

The general style seems to have originated at the end of the 19th century for the maps that Bartholomew's produced of Scotland. There's a chunk of Mull here. By the 1920's they were producing similar maps of England and Wales. There's a chunk of Liverpool here. These were derived from the 1" scale Ordnance Survey Popular Edition. They seem to have been widely used as leisure maps (including cycling) by my parents' generation. I probably became familiar with them in the early 1960's, but I suspect the maps I was using dated from ten years earlier. Bartholomew's continued to produce 1/2" to the mile maps into the 1970's.

Until I went back to look at these again I hadn't realised that from the beginning of the 20th Century they described roads as being "First Class", "Secondary" (good), "Indifferent" (but passable by cyclists) or "Not to be recommended to cyclists". Sometimes with variations:

This wasn't done on the basis of some official classification. The information was provided by members of the Cyclists Touring Club, and their logo appeared on the map. I suppose it's an example of crowd-sourcing.

According to this, there was a formal arrangement between Bartholomew's and the CTC from 1910-1928. Apparently (from here) CTC had a network of map revision officers who tracked changes in the minor road network and correspondence continued until 1975. Though by then CTC felt that the maps didn't take much notice of the feedback their members were supplying.

I see some similarities between the OSM Cycle Map and the Bartholomew style. I don't know whether there are practical reasons for that, though I suspect there are. I hadn't expected to find a parallel in the way that the underlying data was sourced, but it obviously made as much sense in the past to crowd-source local detail as it does now.

The National Library of Scotland provides detailed scans of old Bartholomew maps for England and Wales, and for Scotland in their extensive online collection. And there's more here.

*(and the ability to travel south without turning the map upside down)

Green Way

2011-02-16T10:23:00.003Z

I think I've mentioned before that one of the challenges around here is finding decent cycle routes through, or around, the various towns. Traffic in the centres can be very busy, and the major roads are designed to keep cars moving. While there are plenty of alternatives on the minor roads, these tend to be very fragmented and you need to know how to find your way. A simple journey from A to B can get complicated when you are not familiar with the best routes.

Difficulty in navigating around back roads is a reasonable problem when I am crossing towns that I don't visit very often. But we have lived here for more than ten years now, and it's a bit of an embarrassment to realise that I sometimes have the same problem in my own town.

This has come up because I had to take the car in for a service this week. The garage is on the other side of town, so these days I stick the bike in the car, and cycle back. With a few minor exceptions, I normally follow much the same route whether I am driving or cycling.

Finally it occurred to me that there ought to be a better way. And there is. Or at least I think there is.

There's a back lane that follows some old waterways near the centre of town. It dives under bridges that carry most of the traffic. There is only one point where you have to get off the bike to negotiate some steps and a messy road junction. Otherwise the route zigzags around the backs of offices and houses. Most of it is well surfaced, quite smooth, pleasant to ride, and remarkably quiet. Best of all, it slices right through busy and messy parts at the edge of the town centre, where it is particularly difficult to find alternatives.

I knew it was there of course. It is on the local maps, and I ride across it often enough. But bizarrely I had never thought to give it a proper try on the bike. Which makes me wonder how many similar alternatives I am missing.

The only fly in the ointment is that I'm not entirely sure that cycling is allowed along the whole length. It certainly is on parts, because there are signs to say so. At a few points I'm afraid I was concentrating on finding my way, and I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been to what all the signs said. Open Street Map shows it as a footpath. The local authority cycle map shows most of it as part of the local cycle network. I need to take a more careful look.

Turville and Hambleden (again)

2011-02-12T21:02:00.016Z

It's been a beautiful day today, and I've covered 42 miles on the bike. That's my longest ride in months: and it feels like it.

The plan was to ride out to Christmas Common via Henley, then from Northend down Holloway Lane (a lovely ancient road) to Turville. The return was going to be across Hambleden weir and home through Warren Row and along NCR4. These are all familiar roads, so I didn't think to take a map.

Just after leaving home, it occurred to me that my plan involved covering the same roads in the first and last part of my day. I had plenty of time, and felt up for anything, so I thought I would take a different loop on the way out, approaching Christmas Common from the north via Marlow and through Stokenchurch.

The bit between Stokenchurch and Christmas Common is not so familiar to me, but I knew it was part of the Chilterns Cycle Route, so I didn't think it would be difficult to follow. I thought it would be a bit different and I was right.

Unfortunately I turned off too soon, and ended up in Ibstone. That road gets me directly to Turville a bit more quickly than I had planned. It's been a bit of a day for bright ideas that turn out not to be so clever. I decided I would be able to get back on track by taking a short-cut along the Chilterns Way, a bridle path. Several people on mountain bikes had obviously gone the same way before me. I could tell because they left tyre marks in a very soft and muddy path. I was slower to twig that this meant riding it on a road bike was a non-starter. But I was too stubborn to backtrack.

That part of the Chilterns Way runs through the Wormsley Estate, which is owned by the Getty family, so you pretty much have to stick to the path. I ended up pushing the bike through a lot of sticky mud for longer than I would have wished. However, we made it in the end, around a long difficult loop that took me back to where I had originally left the road.

At that point I gave up any ideas of finding a short-cut to Christmas Common, and pressed on directly to Turville. I made it most of the way up Holloway lane, before turning round and heading for home.

The return journey was much more straightforward, with one exception. I was running later than I had planned, so to save time I came back across the roundabout where I've been knocked off the bike by a car once, and almost knocked off another time. This is not my favourite piece of road. This evening, as I rode round the roundabout I was Clarkson'ed by an idiot who yelled and peeped his horn at me. He obviously didn't think I ought to be there. The seriously wealthy might be able to insulate themselves from the rest of the world, but the rest of us can't. I hope that it ruined his day to discover that cyclists use his personal roundabout - but he wasn't going to spoil mine. It felt good to have covered a longer distance, and (as usual) when things went a bit pear-shaped they also got more interesting.

The coming of the Camerons

2011-02-12T11:11:00.003Z

Looking for some information on the old Bartholomew 1/2" maps, I got diverted (like you do) by a charming, if not entirely convincing, short film from 1944 in the Scottish Screen Archive.

Jean Cameron is a post woman in the highlands, who cycles around some beautiful scenery delivering the post (or as they put it: "keeping the glen folk in touch with the world"). The film is the story of her request to be issued with uniform trousers rather than the regulation skirt.

I can't figure out how to embed it, but the link is here.

War on the enemies of empathy

2011-02-10T21:36:00.003Z

I'm still wondering who my enemy is supposed to be in the war on the motorist. Then I came across an interesting and thought provoking piece of research called "Safety, cycling and sharing the road" on theDfT website here.

They interviewed cyclists, other road users and the parents of young cyclists about their views on cycling, the problems of interacting with other road users, and strategies for dealing with them. The paper was published a few months ago, but I didn't find it until today, from a link provided by Londonneur. For which thanks.

A lot of what they say rings true, and I like the different ways they describe different types of cyclist, the attitudes of different road users, and the various ways that things go wrong. They talk, for example, about acts of aggression, and failures of attitude, competence, and expectation as examples of the sort of thing that goes wrong when different types of road users are sharing the road.

But to my mind it's when they get on to stereotypes and empathy that things get really interesting. They describe empathy between different types of road user as "an important ingredient in successful road sharing".

When they talked to cyclists about how they see other road users they found a mix of different stereotypes. Some cyclists emphasised the selﬁshness and aggression they saw in other road users, but others were more inclined to explain driver behaviour by other factors. Of course, many of the cyclists they talked to were also drivers, which would explain why they found diverse views.

Quite a lot of the blogs about this stuff seem to originate in London, and maybe we should all note that London is where they found the emphasis on selfishness and aggression was particularly apparent (this applies all types of road user – drivers and pedestrians, as well as cyclists).

However, back to the empathy thing. Overall they found higher levels of empathy for car drivers than they found for other road users. And the groups for which there is less empathy don't just include cyclists. The same applies to all sorts of "minority" road users: cyclists, of course, but HGV drivers and bus drivers as well.

It's no real surprise to read what the stereotypes of cyclists were like: "the stereotypical cyclist emerges as a kind of lawless free-rider in the highly constrained and heavily taxed world of the driver". "serious failures of attitude", "generalised disregard for the law" "lack of concern for the needs of drivers", (linked to the fact that cyclists do not need to be licensed or insured). "serious failures of competence and knowledge of the rules of the road" (linked to the fact that cyclists are not required to undertake training).

Apparently even the most negative towards cyclists concede that not all are the same, but the consensus was that most conform to the stereotype: in London, it was estimated that 70–80% of cyclists do.

One of several conclusions from all this is that there is a failure in the culture of road sharing, and a lack of consensus about whether cyclists belong on the roads. I'm still grappling with the question of who my enemy is supposed to be in all this, so I don't want to get diverted into the debates about when cyclists ought to be given separate facilities. But the bit about the culture of road sharing is interesting.

I like this idea that the culture of road sharing is part of the problem, and that empathy is the key to successful road sharing. So I'm inclined to think that the real enemies I should be concerned with are those who undermine empathy between road users.

It seems to me that would exclude the vast majority of other road users - even those who think that I'm a "lawless free-rider" (I quite like the idea of being seen as a lawless free-rider). On the other hand it would include politicians who concoct thoughtless "War on the Motorist" nonsense, journalists (and others) that sensationalise the issues, and of course, anyone that acts aggressively to other road users - whether they are driver or cyclist.

The fog of the war on the motorist

2011-02-06T10:54:00.001Z

A month or so ago I was lent a copy of a documentary called “The Fog of War”. In this Robert McNamara, (1916-2009), former US Secretary of Defence reflects on the lessons he learned during a life that involved advising Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Johnson during the Vietnam War. Before he worked for Kennedy, McNamara ran the Ford Motor Company, and after Johnson fired him he ran the World Bank. It's not important, but it's quite interesting that his middle name was "Strange".

I've been mulling over the idea that his eleven lessons of war might be applied to this mythical war between cyclists and motorists:

Empathize with your enemy
Rationality will not save us
There's something beyond one's self
Maximize efficiency
Proportionality should be a guideline in war
Get the data
Belief and seeing are often both wrong
Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning
In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
Never say never
You can't change human nature

I suspect some of them would - if only I could figure out who my enemy is supposed to be. The fact that I can’t even answer that presumably means that I’m stuck on rule #1.

There's more about Mr McNamara here, and the whole Fog of War documentary can be viewed here.

You know that you are riding too slowly when you are overtaken by your own shadow

2011-02-04T10:44:00.000Z

You know that you are riding too slowly from Peter Reed on Vimeo.

Getting a grip

2011-02-03T16:53:00.006Z

For my first attempts to use the helmet camera I tried the obvious approach and mounted it on my helmet. I felt like a teletubby, and I found that I ended up capturing too much sky, or too much tarmac. I've also tried various ways of attaching the camera to my clothing, but none worked very well for me when I was riding. I decided it would be better mounted on the bike.

Veho provide a wide variety of different options for attaching the camera to different things. They are very clever, and I think they would work fine if there was a bit more room available on the handlebars, but I found I had trouble locating the camera with a clear line of sight around the bar bag, brake cables, and other bits and pieces. I needed a way of lifting it a bit further away from the bar without losing stability.

I bodged up home-made bracket Mark-1 from various bits and pieces. It worked up to a point, but it needed very careful positioning to get a clear view. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and I didn't know which until I got home and saw the results.

Mark-2 was an improved version, built from Meccano, which worked better. The results were more consistent, but it wasn't rigid enough, so they were consistently shaky. It did give me a better idea of where I needed the camera to be positioned though.

At least at that stage I thought I understood better what I needed to achieve. So I set out to build something that would position the camera where I wanted it, would be stable enough, and give me some ability to adjust the camera position.

Bracket Mark-3 aimed for all that, and turned out to be too ambitious. It was nice on paper, but some way beyond my limited construction skills. So it never got completed, and I went back to the drawing board to figure out something simpler.

I thought I was beginning get my ideas sorted out, but then this morning I was mooching around B&Q and discovered their mini clamps. These were probably not designed to be used as camera mounts, but they looked as though they might work.

It's been a lovely day today, so I treated myself to a set this morning and tried them out this afternoon. There's a picture that gives a better idea of how it works here. As far as I can tell, they are the best solution (so far). They are very easy to mount, they give me a choice of different camera positions, and they seem to be reasonably stable.

Once I manage to edit the results we'll be able to see whether they are good enough to justify an Oscar nomination. I suspect not. But these clamps look as though they might meet my limited needs for the time being.

Clever animation

2011-02-03T13:24:00.000Z

London Hire Bikes animation from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.

From here via Jack Thurston

January roundup

2011-02-02T20:40:00.002Z

It's not much of a story for January, with just half a dozen rides covering about hundred miles in total. Things need to pick up a bit.

I've made more progress with some related activities though.

To start with, I managed to build myself a new copy of the OSM Cycle Map for the GPS. There are plenty of other people who have done that, of course, so it's no great achievement. The tools needed are readily available, but it's a while since I last used them. After some early success, as the map grew I found things got more difficult. So for a while I've been using versions of the map on the GPS that others have provided. This time I found that some of the options needed a bit of tweaking, but apart from that it was straightforward enough. I've loaded the map onto the GPS and tried out a little bit. It seems to work fine, though routing over anything more than a few miles is causing me problems. I'm not sure why, but I normally plan the more difficult routes beforehand, so it isn't very important.

In the last month I've also managed to create a new copy of the OSM database on the old computer that sits under my desk. I used a similar database in the past to estimate the amount of road coverage in different parts of the country. The results I produced then have long been superseded, but there are some other ideas that I would like to play around with. It all works OK, but the database load took a lot longer than I expected. That's partly a sign that I didn't pay enough attention to performance issues before I lumbered into it, but mainly a sign of impressive coverage and detail in the data.

I've also started to get stuff ready to use my new helmet camera. We've been seeing a lot of media comment about cyclists using helmet cameras to record dodgy driving. That's not my main interest. I want to see how well these little cameras work as a way of recording some favourite rides. Things aren't really ready yet, but I'm getting there. I've experimented with different ways of mounting the camera - on my helmet, my arm / shoulder and clipped to my clothing. None of them seems entirely satisfactory, so there's plenty of scope for more tinkering (which is part of the fun). I'm also starting to getting to grips with different tools for editing out the most boring bits.

Lastly, I can't help feeling that this year I should be contributing something to groups involved in local cycling action, and I've started to make moves in that direction. It's early days, but contact has been made, and we'll see what happens.

In summary, I can't claim that the cycling year has really started yet, but with January and some groundwork behind me things are promising to pick up.

Fat Man on a Bicycle

2011-01-25T17:20:00.002Z

It doesn't seem right to mock the unusual view that Eric Pickles takes of cycling and cyclists. Apart from which, there people who can do it more generously than I would.

http://lofidelitybicycleclub.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/kinky-pickles/

So as a distraction here is something from the BFI that has absolutely nothing to do with the idea that one day Eric might feel the roads are safe enough for him to try a bike.

Local sustainable transport fund

2011-01-19T21:06:00.005Z

Today the Department for Transport has published guidelines on applying for grants from the sustainable transport fund.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/regional/transportfund/

This fund will provide £560 million over 4 years to 2014-15.The total amount allocated for this year is £80m. However £11m of this has already been allocated for Bikeability training. By my reckoning this leaves £69m. The annual funding goes up to £140m next year, of which £11m goes to Bikeability. It's all a bit shabby, but I'm not going to get into whether this overall level of funding is reasonable or not. That's what it is, and there isn't much any of us can do about it until the next election. The more immediate issue is how to make sure that it is used wisely.

Basically, each of our local authorities need to plead for their share of the money. It's a bit complicated to work out exactly who can apply, but I reckon it's about 150 local authorities in England. So that's about £1/2m for each authority this year, and a bit less than £1m each next year (on average).

The important thing is that the DfT will assess proposals on the basis of whether they meet two core policy objectives. Those are: supporting the local economy, and reducing carbon emissions. Beyond that it will help if proposals also deliver wider social and economic benefits (such as improving accessibility and social inclusion), improving safety, bringing about improvements to air quality and wider environmental benefits, and promoting increased levels of physical activity.

(this my summary - please refer to the source documents for the whole paraphernalia).

My current plan is to contact my local councillors to ask what proposals my own local authority is putting forward. In addition to the criteria above, the DfT says that they will also assess the degree to which any proposals have the support of the local community. So it sounds as though I ought to have an opportunity to express my support (or otherwise).

Before I put this into action, does anyone have any further suggestions?

Moving pictures

2011-01-19T00:03:00.002Z

Since Christmas I've been trying out different ways of mounting my new helmet camera. I'm not happy with it stuck on top of the helmet. It makes me feel like a Teletubby, and my first attempts always ended up capturing either too much sky or too much tarmac.

So I've been trying some different ways of mounting the camera on the bike - with varying degrees of success.

The challenge is to achieve a decent line of sight, with a reasonable amount of stability. I want the mount to be easily attached and detached (without harming the bike). For now I'm happy just to have the camera pointing forwards, but in future it could be interesting to try some variations.

The camera came with a choice of different attachments, but none of them quite cuts it. I'm not sure how others do this, so to start with I tried bodging alternatives from various odds and ends. Then during the great sort-out of the office and attic last week I re-discovered my old Meccano set. The Magic of Meccano is that it makes it easy to try out all sort of different ideas.

My Mark-I custom camera mount hangs from one of the handlebar drops. After clearing a bit of paperwork this afternoon I treated myself to an hour on the bike to try it out. I looped over Winter Hill as the afternoon came to an end. Here is the result.

Winter Hill Loop.

Hanging the camera from the handlebar drops seems to work reasonably well. It's out of the way of the bar bag, brake cables, and other gizmos, so the camera has a reasonable line of sight. The mount is easy to attach and detach. I can see whether the little "recording" LED on the camera is flashing, and I can reach to turn recording on and off while I ride. It would be nice if it was easier to vary the direction that the camera points in, but that can wait for now. Although it doesn't bounce around as badly as I feared, I think the first priority is to work on making the attachment more rigid.

Standards for success

2011-01-18T11:49:00.006Z

In the middle of my panic about losing a heap of data, Steve sent me this link.

http://xkcd.com/349/

I remember an older and wiser colleague once telling me that you could track the disintegration of a project by the equipment that was being installed in the office. I don't know if it still works this way, but it used to be that all projects started by installing desks and computers, then as the schedule slid, and the working days got longer, they brought in coffee machines, then toasters, fridges, microwaves, and finally mattresses. (One of the big advantages of doing this stuff at home is that all those are already to hand).

These things are funny because we recognise a truth that isn't so funny, but they are the kind of comment that helped skewer me to my original plan, and stop me from just walking away. Now I have (pretty much) all the data back, and a (pretty much) working network. And Chris should be pleased that I've also got a working copy of Linux, that hosts a working GIS database, which I can access from elsewhere on the network.

So I'd say that standards for success didn't slip much at all. I lost a little bit of data, through my own incompetence. And for some reason that I can't fathom we are unable to use one of the printers from an old Windows laptop. Otherwise we are not just back where we started - some progress has been made.

In some ways this has all been a bit of a blast from my past. I may not be a technical wizard, but at least I've still got that stubborn determination not to be beaten by some stupid machine (whatever it costs in lost sleep).

Until I mess it all up again, I am going to give myself a little pat on the back, then get to play with my new GIS database.

Oh heck, that'll be after I've done the tax form.

Panic over

2011-01-14T17:11:00.008Z

Now that the dust has settled, and I know that I have all my business critical work secured I realise how close I came to losing something really important. That's my cycling spreadsheet, with a record of nearly three years of rides.

In the wee small hours of this morning I was worrying about the relatively trivial matter of re-entering a year's worth of book-keeping activity from the paper records in my little black box. Losing track of my Eddington number would have been a far more serious issue, and far more difficult to recover.

Many years ago I was a system programmer on mainframes. Screwing up the accounts database, along with the backup copy would mean that virtually an entire organisation would grind to a halt until it was sorted. More than thirty years on, I still remember a meeting with the Chief Accountant the morning after we did just that. You'd think I would have learned.

At times like this I repeat the little ditty that we used to recite in those days:

I hate this damn computer
I wish that they would sell it
It won't do what I want it to
Only what I tell it

It's my reminder that whether it's Linux, Windows, Mac OS, or the 1970's mainframe that we used to grapple with, there's not a lot of point blaming the software. The operating system didn't decide to over-write the back-up with corrupt data, or install the wrong version of a software package.

Anyway, I think we've got everything sorted now. Until it returns to normal the office is looking nice and tidy. I'm certainly going to to have another try at Linux, but I think I'll take a somewhat different approach next time. And I can go on working on my Eddington number, without having to reboot it.

The most dangerous thing in the world: the enthusiastic idiot

2011-01-13T21:31:00.005Z

Much of this week has been spent sorting out the office at home.

I can't quite believe it myself, but the previous sentence is true. I have spent almost a week sorting stuff out in the office. Unfortunately I'm no good at throwing things out. So I've accumulated a ridiculous amount of junk over the years, and when I say "sort out" it really means that some stuff goes, but most just gets rearranged, boxed up and stuffed into the loft. This isn't new, so the loft is already full of stuff that's been boxed up during previous efforts to get sorted.

So it was necessary to make some room in the loft as well.

Making room in the loft meant throwing out a lot of even older junk, including some old computers that have been stored up there since the days of Babbage, or thereabouts. The reason we kept them in the first place was that I wasn't sure what was left on the hard drives. The machines pre-dated USB ports, proper network connections, or any writeable media bigger than a floppy drive. So I decided that the best thing was to remove the hard drives, and install them in a newer desktop. That way I could transfer the contents to a removable drive. Of course the really sensible thing would have just been to trash them, but I wasn't thinking too clearly. Anyway, it all went surprisingly well. I stripped out three old drives, re-installed them, transferred the contents, and discovered that they didn't contain anything worth saving.

So it was really a waste of time, but at least I satisfied myself that the old computers could safely go to be recycled. And they did. At the same time I managed to fix a long-standing problem with a flaky graphics card on the newer desk-top.

Flushed with success, it then seemed like a good idea to re-configure the newer desktop so that I could dual boot Linux, and experiment with some open source stuff that isn't available on Windows. In practice all that proved a bit more difficult than I expected, but by this morning I had Ubuntu up and running, and I thought I was a wizard.

I played around or an hour or so, then I rebooted to get Windows back. Oops. Unfortunately I had messed up somewhere, and I discovered that I could no longer boot Windows on the machine that contains a chunk of useful stuff, including the company accounts.

I'd backed everything up, of course. Or at least I thought I had. But I hadn't.

Now I'm in the process of trying to rebuild everything. I seem to have access to most of the files. I've installed the main applications, and at the moment I'm struggling with re-connecting to the network. (I'm writing this on a different machine). I can see the files that hold the company accounts, but I haven't yet worked out how to get them working - which is probably the most important thing.

Time will tell, but I think I'll get there in the end. But it's been a terrible waste of time, not to mention a humbling experience.

Still, the office is looking a lot better, and one day I'll look back and laugh at what an idiot I am. Maybe.

Later: I've got the network back. Starting to install updates.

It's now gone 1:00 am, the network is working, the printers are working, I can access the external drives as well as the internal drive, and I seem to have got all the old files still.

The accounts package is working. I can import my last backup. But the contents are all garbled.

Not garbled in a normal way. Garbled in a completely different way.

Tomorrow is another day.

It's 10:00 the following morning, and I now have my accounts back. I'm a happy bunny. The only issue I have to face now is everyone telling me that you don't get these problems on a Mac.

Hambleden again

2011-01-10T00:12:00.003Z

No messing about today. Nothing complicated or remarkable. Just a variation on a regular loop up through Marlow, Fingest, and Hambleden doing the usual stuff.

Even the variation wasn't much of one. In the past I've experimented with different routes home from Hambleden, but I've never tried the most direct one. That would be over the weir at Mill End then up Aston Lane to Remenham Hill, to join up with another regular route around Crazies Hill (yes, really). I think the only reason I've not returned this way before is that a couple of years ago I rode the reverse direction, down Aston Lane. In those far-off days it stuck in my mind as a long steep climb. It isn't though, and it made for a change.

The weather was a bit cold, but bright and sunny. We'd had a frost overnight, and there were still patches of ice around, but nothing to worry about. The Thames seemed very full, and the flow over the weir at Mill End was quite impressive.

It was nice to see plenty of other people out and about enjoying the day.

It's been great, and I've only done two rides so far in 2011, so plenty more to go.