Quarterly Project July-Sept2017

The BBC have reported that in the UK "Renewables provide more than half UK electricity for first time" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40198567

As part of my work I am starting a project to match government open data for wind power to wind turbines/farms in OSM. Could I selfishly suggest 'renewable power'.

Regards,
Jez

I would be interested in mapping bus route relations. Indeed, I would be interested in understanding how they work at all, because at present I struggle to make head or tail of them.

To aid this, I can provide (at least in SE, EM, EA and London, and potentially SW and WM as well) the sets of routing data that appear on the traveline south east and anglia (TSEA) website (www.travelinesoutheast.org.uk) under the "Find a Timetable" option. These are not always right, for reasons I can enumerate if people want to go forward with this, but I see this project as updating / creating relations on OSM, while at the same time improving the routing on TSEA.

Would definitely be good to keep going with the quarterly projects!

I'm also interested in bus routes Stuart. With my work at TransportAPI (day job) I'm discovering some interesting things which could be fixed in the data. Actually I was just about to email the UK list about this. We're not using the route relations, partly because I know they're not complete, but they're progressing, and could be a good thing for a quarterly project to give a boost to.

There are a dozen or so turbines near me that need mapping, so some guidance about how to determine details by observing them would be useful.

I see you're a big fan ;) http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2844263768

Entrances to stations. My interest is national rail in London and elsewhere. But underground were mentioned recently.

For starters - not at all obvious that Streatham Common has 2 entrances apart from the circumstantial evidence of bike stands.
http://osm.org/go/euusKmXEo--

Having said that I would second Stuart's proposal as regards bus relations. I agree these are very difficult to get right and, in any case, are invisible on the Standard View which doesn't help matters.

(I've been trying to get buses mapped in South Yorkshire the past year or so and as a result Barnsley is well covered.)

Whether or not we go ahead with this for the next Quarterly, I'm open to collaboration and I hereby offer any guidance or help with relations, to Stuart or others, as I can.

There are a number near me which I would like to map, but
determining where they belong on the map is my first problem!

Colin

Interesting. Surely the Marr Wind Farm turbines are all
horizontal axis, not vertical ? Or am I missing something
important?

Colin

You are not missing something. Somebody didn't know which is which (it wasn't me!).... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine#/media/File:HAWT_and_VAWTs_in_operation_medium.gif The vast majority of turbines will be Horizontal Axis. I rest my case for the need for improvement :)

I take it back, it was me 😢 http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2844263766/history

+1 for renewables
Q: are solar farms also present in the open data?

they are, yes, if greater than 1MW output. Open data is the https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/renewable-energy-planning-database-monthly-extract

Jez. Beware that the REPD wind data isn't great quality. It's a record of initial planning applications, not what actually got built!

I know this data in detail as I maintain a list of embedded generation at work. Can probably share Scottish data but the rest still contains renewable UK data sources.

P.s. see variable pitch website that uses RO data (renewable obligation).

If we go with renewables can we add ev charge points also? Electric vehicles are going to be increasingly important and the current commerical mapping is a bit fractured. I believe there's a realtime API to the National Charge Point Register which is opendata

If we go with bus route relations can we all pile in and collaborate to complete one city? Having a complete map in one place as a demonstrator I think is more valuable than a gradual improvement everywhere which is kind of invisible

Are there any really good simple guides on how to map bus routes, last time I looked it was very complicated. Any good youtube videos that are accurate on how to do it?

Not that I have found.

I can only speak in a personal capacity but I think we also have the situation, as is the case with a lot of mapping of intermediate complexity, where iD and Potlatch fall a little short of being able to handle things well, and JOSM is overly complex. (I've yet to use Merkaator - maybe I'm missing a trick!)

Having said that, if we go choose to go with bus routing for the Quarterly, I am quite happy to put together a how-to for people to use.

The first problem I see is how do I survey bus routes, short of spending large amounts of time and money travelling the routes?

That said I do find the transport layer useful, especially in rural areas, as it gives a visual indication of where the buses go rather than the traveline approach of where do you want to go.

Not helped by there being at least 2 ways of representing a bus route. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bus_routes_in_London (see method described under Legacy bus routes). How does this reflect what ia done outside London.

I think bus routes is a useful topic even if it isnt the July-Sept project. Maybe preparitory work for Oct project.

Most routes outside London seem to be mapped (if they are at all) with type=route. Ideally these would be subsumed under new route_master relations but, whether we do this next Quarterly or some time in the future, I feel the important thing is filling in the basic coverage rather than getting the tagging updated. Having said that, why not aim high?

How appropriate that London uses the route_master tagging extensively :)

Public art (Statues, Art and Plaques)

Public art (Statues, Art and Plaques)
+1

Seems nicely outside for summer

Knowing how frequently bus routes change, I'm not convinced mapping them is all that useful, added with the complexity of service patterns, such as series that only run on school days, or once a day/week there's a special service which uses the same route number buy goes somewhere else.

Station entrances and other detailed information to support bus routing, and the linking of stops to the route network is however useful.

That's surely just a question of framing the project correctly. So it is perfectly valid to leave off occasional services - school services, once-a-week shopper services, etc, and demand responsive "area" services almost have to be left off because they are unmappable as relations as they don't have a fixed route.

But none of that invalidates the need to improve the data. After all, one of the default layers on openstreetmap.org is a transport layer, and there are parts of the UK that are very, very poorly complete (my map happened to open on Grimsby just now, and there are one or two routes at most, and none when you get outside the town). Does partial data look partial, or does it make it look like there are no services to a place? In large towns, probably the former, but in smaller places it will be the latter and people could well be put off travelling as a result.

I would personally, as a member of the public, find improved transport maps a very useful addition.

I'm happy to put this back to a later project if people wish, so that I can get some ducks lined up in terms of visualisers, etc. But what I can offer is the open data Traveline National Data Set (TNDS), but at a point earlier in the process than the TNDS output because that strips out the route tracks at present. So I can provide routing data for the SE, EM and EA regions of traveline, and I can process the data to identify which are the frequent routes, compared to the once-a-day variations or even the occasional service. I'm working at providing a visualiser for this data.

As I said in a previous thread, the source data isn't perfect because it is automatically generated in many cases. But I also see this as a two-way street where both sets of data are improved - we have a starting position, we have sources that we can cross reference (operators and local authorities, although have to check usage terms if there are any), and we can map out on the street via survey. Best of all, once we have it up and running I can re-visualise the data each week and flag up changes. At least, that's the intention.

Cheers
Stuart

The public art would be great for the "outdoor months".
We might be able to find lists, such as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_Kingdom_Sustrans_Artwork that need locations found.

As an aside, I swear that when I woke up earlier in the week to the BBC news on Radio 3, they were announcing a £4m project to photograph public art and then release it as open data. But I can’t find any reference to it now, so I’m actually unsure if it is a thing, or just a figment of my imagination!
Regards,
Stuart

As lead dev of openplaques.org ( http://openplaques.org ) I would gladly accept a slice of that 4 mill ;)