Philately will get you nowhere

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

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.

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*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

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 They haven't been published for over 30 years, so any we find in second-hand bookshops are hopelessly out of date.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

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

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

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

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.