The Freemap blog, revisited

It’s that time of year again, Dark Sunday is imminent. For those that enjoy getting out and about at the weekends, more so mapping when you’re often out for most of the day (or at least I am) and want a sensible amount of time to do it in without stumbling out of bed bleary-eyed at some godforsaken hour on a Saturday morning and skipping breakfast, this is one of the less-liked annual events. So it was good to hear that this government might finally be doing something something sensible. See here.

While I would certainly not say this about most government policies, all I can say is “bring it on”! It’s quite frankly ridiculous that on Sunday, the sun will be rising before 7 but setting before 5. What sort of timezone is that? Clearly the wrong one, that’s for sure. Apologists for British Winter Time say that GMT+1 is “Berlin Time”, but that’s quite frankly rubbish. Berlin is arguably on the wrong timezone (it ought to be in EET) and so are we. The modern working day does not centre round 12 noon, but around 1pm. So our timezone should be such that solar noon is as close to 1pm as possible. On that measure, it would be more sensible to describe Winter Time as Lisbon Time or Reykjavik Time, as it’s more appropriate for those sort of longitudes.

Year-round BST would achieve that. I’m not necessarily a supporter of GMT+2 in the summer (being still light at 10.30pm would be a bit bizarre and disrupt people’s sleep patterns, I suspect) but I do think we should do something about winter time. Granted, by the time we get to December you’re squeezed both ways, morning and evening, and after Christmas solar noon shifts forward by about 30 minutes,. so I can grudgingly see the need for Winter Time in the latter half of the darker months, but the imbalance in November with wasted morning daylight and early evening darkness is ridiculous. Oh, and just getting up and going to bed an hour earlier is a non-starter, unless you want to be anti-social and leave the pub an hour earlier than anyone else. Not to mention train services on Sunday morning not getting going an hour earlier either…

So, bring it on! It would certainly make a difference to winter mapping…

Back in March I posted about an experiment involving overlaying OSM footpath data on two OpenData sets – VectorMap District raster tiles and LandForm PANORAMA height data – to create a pseudo-Landranger open map. At the time I only covered a very small area of southern England but now I have expanded coverage significantly.

The maps – at http://www.free-map.org.uk/vmd/ – cover most of England south of Manchester (except the far east) and all of Wales, and overlay rights of way (paths with a designation tag, coloured in red in roughly the same scheme as Landranger) and permissive paths (foot=permissive, coloured blue) on VectorMap District tiles already overlaid with LandForm Panorama contours.

As mentioned already there are one or two issues: service roads are unfortunately not present on the VMD tiles so any service roads which are not rights of way will not appear. It’s a similar case for “ORPAs” – Other Routes with Public Access – which have no designation tag and consequently do not appear, though if some sort of standardised tagging (such as “suspected=orpa” for a route which a mapper suspected was an ORPA) was adopted, they could be added. The reason why only select ways are overlaid, by the way, is not to do with the Mapnik stylesheet (it would be simple to add more rules) but the underlying database. Due to server constraints, the database only contains rights of way and permissive paths (and roads in my local area, i.e. Hampshire and surrounds)

Another issue of course is that not every right of way has a designation tag, and not every permissive path has a foot=permissive tag. For instance, although all the main routes up Snowdon are in OSM, only the Llanberis Path and one of the western routes shows up here. Wales seems particularly incompletely tagged in this regard, as few paths seem to show up anywhere I’ve looked so far. So if you want your local area to appear – get tagging!

It’s unlikely that the range will be expanded much for the moment: creating the tiles doesn’t take too long but sadly the speed of upload over a home broadband line is still *horrendously* slow (think 30 to 45 minutes for around or just over 100MB of data).

Finally an update on Freemap. As I’ve said already, I’m doing home rendering of certain areas to increase the frequency of updates, and have settled upon the counties of Hampshire, Surrey, Wiltshire and West Sussex. (Why? They’re local to me, and they are the counties that I do most of my mapping in). Again, the main constraint is speed of upload – however if you have a county you’d like to see rendered more often, please email me on nick dot whitelegg at yahoo dot co dot uk.

I don’t particularly want this blog to get political, but I feel compelled to post on this.

Due to the fact that (thankfully) Europe has a better public transport system than the USA (though the latter is at least moving in the right direction, at least in the part of Colorado I visited recently) I’ve never needed to drive. So consequently to get to far-flung mapping destinations in Hampshire, I’ve relied on public transport including a number of rural bus services.

I read on the local bus company’s website that large reductions are being made to rural services from the end of this month, primarily but not exclusively at evenings and weekends. Now, given all the issues with global warming, should we *really* be doing this? The obvious effect of this will be to encourage more journeys by private car, not less. And (the oft-made point) those people that rely on public transport will have little choice.

Granted these journeys may be quiet, but central government should be promoting their use, not cutting off money to local councils which, as well as the above, has been the source of a long-running industrial dispute involving rubbish collection in the town in which I live, which peaked during the height of summer, due to trying to cut the pay of already-poorly-paid rubbish workers.

Sorry if this is a political comment to conclude, but it’s that old cliche. Voting Conservative is like turkeys voting for Christmas. Government is so obsessed with deficit reduction that more pressing needs, such as encouraging public transport and just plain old-fashioned human morality, are going out the window. As I said before, although the USA is a long way behind Europe in public transport, at least it’s going the right way, unlike, it seems, the UK. Time for Cameron and his band of skinflints to visit somewhere with a progressive outlook towards public transport. Denver.

Sorry, first post in a while, as I’ve been fairly busy over the summer, not to mention spending two or three weeks of it in Colorado, attending SOTM and doing lots of walking and even some new mapping! (Summit County to be precise – maybe more on that later…)

But anyway, a quick update on Freemap. Continuing thanks to SUCS for hosting the tiles but I’m in addition experimenting with home rendering to allow more frequent updates. While the technicalities of setting up a postgis database and mapnik rendering these days are not complex, the physical demands of the process remain huge and therefore rendering on the Freemap server itself simply is not feasible. However rendering at home is a little more so, and that’s what I’ve done, at least down to zoom level 14 and for a relatively small area of southern England. You can now find the home-rendered tiles as an alternative layer on the main Freemap page: they’re up-to-date to within a week, but do only cover a small area of southern England at present. This can probably be expanded a little further north and west but due to the extreme slowness of data upload it’s doubtful it will cover the whole country just yet. But it’s a start…