On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 02:45:27PM +0100, Andrew Chadwick (email lists) wrote: > Out of the blue, I've been asked to advise Cyclox, a local cyclists' > advocacy group about improving [upon] the Oxfordshire County Council's > cycle map for the city of Oxford[1], and I've said I'll help out.
That's great - there's been some discussion of this on the Cyclox mailing list (for example at http://tinyurl.com/cycloxmap AKA http://groups.google.co.uk/group/cyclox-forum/browse_thread/thread/a237464df3618a56# ) It's worth noting there's conflicting interests behind the supporting groups: * Oxford University (whose representative is actually who has contacted you, not a Cyclox person at all) will want something that is suitable for Staff and Students - so College and Department names will need to be clear, for example * Oxfordshire County Council will want something that highlights all the cycle facilities they've invested in, whether or not the facilities are actually useful to cyclists * Cyclox will want something that is useful to their membership, who are actual cyclists from all walks of life in Oxford. This sounds great until you start listening to Cyclox member opinions (see that post refered to above for example) when you find there's a subtle conflict with... * OSM who only want facts in the database, not subjective opinions. I'm not sure what would go into making a really useful local cycling map, but I think at some point it's going to need some subjective tagging. When this has cropped up before some people have said we just need to add lots of factual tags and the rest can be calculated from that. This is good theory, but imagine how hard it would be to render the current map if instead of highway=motorway we instead had car=yes, lanes=3, oneway=yes, hard_shoulder=yes, foot=no, bicycle=no, horse=no, learner_driver=no, etc! highway=motorway is great for a traditional road map, because the classification of roads for motorvehicles by officialdom is generally quite sensible. Sadly the same is not true of classification for cycling. > (I really like the look of the so-called "Cheltenham Standard", > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Cheltenham_Standard , which > RichardF dredged up a while back on #osm. I wonder how/if that could be > implemented in a Mapnik ruleset...) What goes around comes around - I *believe* Richard came across the Cheltenham Standard after it was posted on an earlier Cyclox thread about creating an Oxford map, and I mentioned it here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-August/028438.html I like the Cheltenham Standard, and think tags based on it would make a fine basis for a local cycle map. I'd probably not use the colours they've suggested, but that seems to be the first comment from everyone who sees it. I particularly like the healthy disregard it has for official cycle facilities - cycle lanes/etc are simply taken into account when assessing the level of any road, rather than being depicted on the map themselves. The problem is, and remains, the subjectivity - we can probably get good agreement in and around Oxford on what roads are what level, but if someone else tries to tag somewhere else, they might have a different baseline. The stuff you've added to the "discussion" page of the wiki page you refer to above is a good start to helping everyone use the same baseline, so lets keep working in that direction! s _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk