Birmingham City Council has started rolling out a speed limit reduction on many residential roads and in some local centres to 20mph. This presents a great opportunity for local OpenStreetMap mappers to demonstrate the power of OpenStreetMap in keeping pace with the speed limit reduction programme as it progresses.

Phase 1 covers parts of central, south and east Birmingham. The scheme will install signs and lines only – no new traffic calming (e.g. speed bumps) will be introduced as part of this scheme. Road signs and markings will be installed from December 2015 to March 2016 and the speed limit will come into effect once works are complete.

20mph is part of a broader package of measures aimed to give people, especially children, more confidence to walk and cycle. Over the next 5 years the Council intends to put 20mph speed limits on 90% of Birmingham’s roads. Most main roads will keep their existing 30mph or 40mph speed limits.

According to Council consultation in the areas covered, 49 per cent of people were in favour of 20mph limits and 35 per cent opposed. Council data show that the minor roads (mainly residential) in this particular scheme were the location for 508 casualties, including 68 deaths or serious injuries between 2011 and 2013. That is roughly one casualty every two days.

OpenStreetMap locally has worked with Birmingham City Council Transportation over the past year to understand how we could achieve a “realtime mapping” of the changes.

The Council estimate related annual costs from injuries, hospital and ambulance services, would reduce by up to £870,000. The total cost is £1.025m, with almost 80 per cent coming from a Department for Transport grant to encourage cycling.

OpenStreetMap locally has worked with Birmingham City Council Transportation over the past year to understand how we could achieve a “realtime mapping” of the changes. They have provided a suitable opendata shapefile of all the roads affected and we have access to weekly project reports on works scheduled and completed, so we should be able to reflect the changes as they take place. Not quite “realtime” but a huge step towards it. It’s taken a deal of persistence on our part, but once we secured some internal sponsors, things moved forward consistently.

We’re still to decide how best to display all this but we have a map of the project’s scope and will also be using ITOWorld’s speed limit map.

Although the Traffic Regulation Order enacting the new legal speed limit doesn’t come into force until the project is completed, the signs will be visible. On the basis that we map what is visible we will be adding 20mph tags as work progresses. Whilst we’ll be reliant largely on progress reports from the Council, there are sure to be some sightings as we move around the affected areas.

It wasn’t just Hadrian’s Wall that I mapped in OpenStreetMap as part of our third UK quarterly project – “all things tourism”.  Closer to home I visited and mapped the wonderful Hill Close Gardens in Warwick. The gardens are a “very rare example of detached Victorian leisure gardens which were found on the outskirts of many towns in Victorian times”. They comprise 16 individual plots, numerous summer houses and the larger visitor centre building. It was therefore no small task to add this to OpenStreetMap – in fact I still have a couple of plots left to map as I ran out of time on the day I visited the gardens!

In addition to my visit to the gardens (and the numerous photos I took), I made use of the Warwickshire County Council aerial imagery to help add in all the detail and paths. As a reminder to other OpenStreetMappers this aerial imagery is free to use to assist with your mapping efforts. It was fascinating to see how the area had changed over the years thanks to historical maps – this time from Warwickshire County Council’s mapping portal, although I’m sure there are some great maps on the National Library of Scotland’s site too.

Next steps are to finish off the last two plots in the north section of the garden. The gardens also provide lots of information about the history of each plot. It may be good to add this to the gardens’ entry on wikipedia. And of course, I need to add the wikipedia article details to OpenStreetMap so that we continue to build links between these two crowd-sourced projects.

View the map here.

Our third quarterly project for UK OpenStreetMappers saw us focus on all things tourism. A walking holiday along Hadrian’s Wall gave me a great opportunity to map one of the UK’s oldest, and definitely longest, tourist spots. Of course it was in no way a tourist site when it was first built in AD122, but just as maps have changed function from a military tool to an aid for tourists, so has Hadrian’s Wall.

Along with other borders of the Roman Empire, Hadrian’s Wall is a World Heritage Site. Given this, and the prominence of site on the landscape, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t well mapped. The fortification comprises, from north to south, a ditch/cliff edge, the wall, the old military road, and finally another series of ditches know as the Vallum (to keep ordinary folk in the south out of the military zone). In places the Vallum had been mapped as the wall and big swaths of the wall were missing from OpenStreetMap.

Using my collection of photos, GPS traces, and the wonderful historical maps provided by the National Library of Scotland, it didn’t take long to improve the representation of the wall within OpenStreetMap. Now the wall (or wall-route where little of the original wall remains) is correctly mapped and gathered in a relation. The mapping of the vallum is also much improved.

There is however still plenty to do, including mapping other parts of the world heritage site such as the milecastles and the turrets that were built along the wall. A full record of what is included as part of the world heritage site is available on the UNESCO website, with mapped features added to an parent relation in OpenStreetMap.

Happy mapping!

20 September saw the re-opening of Birmingham’s New Street Station after 5 years of redevelopment costing £750m. The  project involved the demolition of Stephenson Tower, a residential tower block; and the removal of 6,000 tonnes of concrete in order to increase the station’s capacity; whilst keeping the station undernaeath operational. A new shopping mall, Grand Central, was also constucted on top of the station, with John Lewis as the flagship tenant. Grand Central is due to open 24 September. A new metro line from Snow Hill station to New Street station is also underway and scheduled to open at the end of October.

• 170,000 passengers a day use Birmingham New Street, nearly triple the 60,000 a day it was designed for when it was last rebuilt in the 1960s
• The new station can now handle 300,000 passengers per day
• New Street is the busiest station outside London, with a train leaving every 37 seconds
• 36 new escalators and 15 lifts, serving every platform, have been installed
• About 60% of rainwater “harvested” from the new-look building’s facade will be used to flush the station’s toilets
• About 1,000 workers were on site, 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the five-year revamp – increasing to 3,500 in its final months

Source: Network Rail

Needless to say OpenStreetMap was there on opening day and our map is now updated to show the new layout as far as pedestrian entrances and approaches is concerned. But there’s lots more to do yet. And the contractors (as always) haven’t quite finished so some detail can’t be mapped yet.

New Street station has a complex layout which will challenge us in representing its multiple layers.

Starting from the bottom layer we have

1.railway lines and platforms

2.Station concourse

(multiple lifts,stairs and escalators joining 1 and 2 above)

3.Shopping mall

(multiple lifts,stairs and escalators joining 2 and 3 above)

4. Car Park

In addition there is a 10 storey office block on part of the building and the North and South entrances are at different levels.

So we need to do some head scratching and planning to get it right: so PLEASE can  non-local mappers  offer your advice  and not just enthusiastically start adding multiple POIs and footways otherwise we’ll end up with an undecipherable jumble.

There’ll be a discussion thread up soon on talkgb where contributions can be planned. Help from public transport, railway and 3D mappers will be greatly appreciated.

It is now becoming increasingly difficult to spot errors in OpenStreetMap just by looking at the map on openstreetmap.org. To help we have a collection of quality assurance tools, and this weekend I discovered a new one developed by Strava. The keen cyclists or runners amongst us will recognise the name – Strava is a phone app/service then enables you to monitor your athletic progress over time and compare it against others. To do this it keeps a track of your run/cycle using the GPS built in to your smartphone. Consequently Strava have built up a large database of GPS traces and user contributed map errors. From this they have built a “routing errors” website to help iron out any issues in the underlying map data, which naturally is based on OpenStreetMap.

The service highlights 2 different types of errors: those manually entered by it’s users, and those automatically detected from the map data and the recorded GPS traces (e.g. many cyclists riding the “wrong” way down what is a one-way street in OpenStreetMap suggests that the OSM data may be incorrect).

I’ve had a quick play with this new quality assurance tool (with mixed results), but I’d love to hear your views. One concern is that the manually submitted “errors” may be a problem with user behaviour or the Strava app itself, rather than an issue with the OpenStreetMap data, al la MapDust – a similar, and now quite dated service from Skobbler. But is this view too pessimistic? Is there useful data in the manually submitted errors? And how about the (US only) automatically detected errors? Are these a reliable source of quality assurance data for OpenStreetMap?

Let us know your views in the comments section below and feel free to share any other great QA tips you may have.