Talk:London

SVG output

I have got osmarender working and have put a PNG file up on the London page. Quite a lot of work to do to allow default settings in renderer to pick up the existing work. You get quite a different picture though if you use Nick's OSM map tester, which must filter tags differently (and only uses latest osmplanet data). Happy to meet with any London contributors to collaborate on working on N London in particular. Steve8 13:48, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

define "London"

ugly as it seems, anywhere within M25 is pretty well a "natural" boundary, if you're looking at somewhere to stop and say "There, that's London completed."

I personally live in Hertforshire, but not the borough of Hertsmere. I have an Enfield postcode, and a telephone number starting with 020, and pay my council tax to the London Borough of Barnet.

Welshie 15:04, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

London OSM people? + wiki categories question

How many OSM people are based in London? I'd be interested to know.

I guess the best way to answer that might be to create Category:Users in London.

How to organise that though? Is that a sub-category of Category:Users in the United Kingdom (all getting a bit heirarchical), or just whack it in as a sub-category of Category:Users by geographical region?

-- Harry Wood 11:16, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it could be subcategory of UK users. Next trick is to define "London". Ojw 12:12, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Well I'm thinking maybe it should not be a subcategory of the UK one, because then you have the next awkward question: Should users be in both UK and London user categories? This is a tricky point with these wiki categories actually. If we keep it as flat heirarchy (all grouped directly under Category:Users by geographical region), then it's easy. You clearly add yourself to both.

Anyway I'll create the Category:Users in London. Don't think the definition of London matters really. Users who consider themselves to be in London, add themselves to the category. -- Harry Wood 09:13, 9 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Red routes / trunk roads

Given that the distinction between trunk roads and primary roads is getting vaguer and vaguer by the day, and that Transport for London seem to have taken responsibility for formerly trunk roads within London, I suggest that within London, we use highway=trunk to denote a Transport for London "Red route", and highway=primary for all the other primary roads within London. Outside of London, in England and Wales, it's up to the Highways Agency as to what a Trunk Route is.

Besides, Osmarender draws trunk roads in red, and Red Routes are the primary routes in London that Transport for London want to keep moving at all costs. Welshie 16:50, 18 Jul 2006 (BST)

Completeness?

How are we measuring completeness? Are that's covered with something? We don't have postcode areas mapped out do we?

I'm also concerned that some people think that mapping are area = road layout and road names. An area (especially in London) is so much more than that. A proper map of London (like the A2Z or a tourist map) includes features/amenities/tourist bits. No-one would navigate London using a road atlas..

We seem to lack a lot of keys and I note that there is some hostility to being anything other than a road atlas. [1]. I look at the map of covent garden and it doesn't tell me anything! What's in the large shaded area? What's it for? Where's the local town hall? Where's the local X? What is in that shaded bit? Maps are for locals too! Secretlondon 06:37, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah I think measuring percentage completeness is probably being done roughly on the basis of percentage of general area covered by something. It'll always be an imprecise measure anyway, but yes this is focussing on achieving road coverage.

I guess it would be interesting to try to somehow track areas where different stages of completeness have been acheived:

Stage 1 - GPS Tracks gathered (not needed for areas with Yahoo! Aerial Imagery coverage)

Stage 2 - Mapped out nodes and segments, tracing over the GPS trackpoints or Yahoo! Aerial Imagery

Stage 3 - Ways with street names and rough street categorisation. All main attractions or navigation landmark nodes tagged.

Stage 4 - All one-way streets, and restrictions tagged. Accurate street categorisation. Also all phoneboxes, post boxes, bus stops(?), pubs, restaurants, supermarkets.

Each stage would have it's own percentage completeness.

Thinking in terms of short-term milestones though, basic road coverage is very important. I'm excited by the fact that we are just a few weeks/months away from having a Central London map at "Stage 3 - 100%". I think this will be a great milestone. Getting the whole of greater London to stage 2 is also very achievable. Maybe a coordinated Yahoo! Aerial Imagery tracing session some time to get it finished off?

In this scheme you would be talking about Stage 4 completeness. This is bound to be much slower to achieve in anything but patchy coverage. It's also harder to measure (How do you know if someone's missed out some telephone boxes?)

...And I think for some people it isn't a goal at all. I know many people are mapping these detailed features "only where they aid streetmap navigation" i.e. not going for stage 4 completeness at all. Should this be everyone's approach? I guess London is where these kind of issues come to a head. For example, I think if you were to map every pub in the Covent Garden area, you'd mess up the map renderings with too many pint glasses! (with the renderers configured as they are at the moment) -- Harry Wood 18:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't know. As a non-driver I'm not interested in making a map for satnavs. I am interested in making a map that tells me where stuff I need is (from the location of council buildings to pubs etc). I'm also interested in making maps that we can use in wikipedia. It's different maps for different users. Maybe different meta data should be displayed depending on scale? I'd love to make something as good as one of the large scale OS maps. We potentially could do fabulous stuff like overlaying bus routes so you could see exactly where you are going and where you need to get off. I don't disagree that basic road coverage isn't important - it's the barebones of the thing. It's just not the end point. ::Secretlondon 09:46, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I think % completeness can only really be road coverage and names... anything else is a moving target... mostly I'm not mapping much else in Putney, mainly on the grounds that, hey, it's a wiki, once all the roads are there people can go on open street map and say, "hey, you've missed the pub at the corner of x and y", and they can just put it in with no fuss. So while obviously a map is much more than just the roads, there's a clear stage two-ness about it. I've actually not bothered updating the postcodes on here much... you can see now what's done in a very up-to-date way from the slippy map, but seeing as I'm here... Randomjunk 11:26, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

heehee. That's an old discussion! But then again...

We never did come up with a more organised completion measuring process. The Germans developed a wiki-based assessment levels e.g. Cologne#Status, which was pretty much the kind of thing I had in mind back then. By being very specific, they're reducing the "moving target" problem. However it probably suffers from the same thing that any wiki-based system suffers from. Somebody gets excited and puts together a big list for assessing completion, and fills it in with some detail, with the hope that lots of other people will help maintain it... and then they don't. I suspect that's the situation we have on the London page here still at the moment

Automated metrics are good way of avoiding the difficulties of updating. The Completeness page lists some tools for this (e.g. the various OS Locator based tricks) But there's no metrics to help us on a more micro level, e.g. can anyone think of an automated way of determining which bits of London have a lot of missing shops?

-- Harry Wood 11:32, 27 June 2011 (BST)

Long Distance Paths

London has several LDPs, two of the best known are the London LOOP and the Capital RING.

These should obviously be included in OSM. They won't currently be rendered, but we may as well get the data in.

I have started adding some of the LOOP in Surrey and Sutton to this relation, I have done a quick search and can't find any other relations for the LOOP yet.

More details on London's LDPs from the Ramblers Association - [2]

--Edgemaster 21:29, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

I've started a page for the London LOOP. Hopefully I'll be adding to it fairly regularly over the coming months.

--Matt 19:49, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Bus stops

User:Thomas Wood on IRC, when I mentioned Talk:Oxford#Bus_stops. --achadwick 17:31, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

<Edgemaster> i've got a bus stop tagging method for london, i cant remember if i documented it
<Edgemaster> i've been using bus_stop for the list of routes (taken from a method i saw used in blackheath)
<Edgemaster> i use name= ref= and id= for the stop details
<Edgemaster> ref being the letter that some of them have on top of the pole, and id being their 'yellow number'

I generally don't tie the bus stop node to the way, leaving it floating to the side as appropriate. I use a node for each stop on each side of the road. When I have details about the route itself, I'll add it to a relation such as #2608. (Although this particular example was based on the route relation proposal at the time of writing, although use of forward/backward stops was later decided as unwise on the mailing lists) --Thomas Wood 18:36, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

We should add some more information to Tag:highway=bus_stop page (or its talk page) about these possibilities -- Harry Wood 22:24, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Fully agree, will work on it sometime and illustrate what I mean with a photo. --Thomas Wood 14:42, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Low emission charging zone

Hi,

is the charging zone already in the map?

Mappers from London, please join the discussion about Low emission zones. see Category:Low emission zone

Thanks.--Lulu-Ann 15:04, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

London wikia request

Hi - I've recently taken on the London wiki [www.london.wikia.com]]. A previous 'someone' there has created a lot of placeholder articles for London streets. Anyone wishing to collaborate and develop some of these pages (or any others of interest) is welcome. Jackiespeel 18:12, 4 October 2011 (BST)

Meet up idea

I wish for the next London pub meet-up to be at the Mandarin Oriental. Best wishes, --Amaroussi (talk) 13:15, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

That's a hotel in Knightsbridge right? Was it you tweeting from there recently? Any particular reason we would pick that as a venue? It's an OK location for improving some building outlines data, but the venue itself... is there are a bar? I imagine it's a very expensive bar. -- Harry Wood (talk) 09:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Mandarin Bar, in the hotel, following two flights of stairs (I think I've mapped it correctly on the main map, correct me if I'm wrong). Either way, we need a master list of venues, because I once said that the Ritz was a no-go for its obnoxious dress code. --Amaroussi (talk) 12:34, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Is TFL using OSM?

On TFL's bus countdown web-app, I'm sure they're using slightly out-of-date OSM data to create their maps, however no copyright disclaimer is given. Example. domdomegg (talk) 09:25, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

I thought they'd added credits to this, but maybe I was looking at similar but different site somewhere.

It's definately OSM though. But.. it's a bit weird. Compare 'stops near N19' map with OpenStreetMap around Archway. Clearly less building coverage, which normally means it's not very up-to-date data from OpenStreetMap however...

look at the terraced houses on their rendering. It's like they've randomly picked some buildings to remove from the dataset. Can't see any logic to it. It literally appears random. Why would they do that? (or why might a 3rd party data supplier to TfL do that?) Maybe they think they've obscured the data such that you can't tell it's from OpenStreetMap. If so... they're wrong. It's definitely OpenStreetMap.

-- Harry Wood (talk) 15:43, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Update. Nowadays TfL has consolidated their web maps into one ...google map https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/?Input=Current+location

It's a shame London's transport organisation chose to adopt maps from an American mega-corp, rather than using London-born not-for-profit open licensed maps. But hey, that's what everyone else does. We have to ask ourselves what aspects of google maps make it more attractive for this kind of thing. Could be their developers knew the google maps API (and they've done some fairly complex overlays). Could be they wanted the google's indoor mapping details inside train stations. Most likely they found no contactable organisation to get into talks with (in the way these government organisations like to do) from OpenStreetMap's side. All aspects we struggle with.

Of course during the period when TfL did use OpenStreetMap, it's a shame they failed to support the project by placing a small (legally required) credit link on their site.

-- Harry Wood (talk) 23:36, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

City of London boundary in relation to the Bridges

Fairly new to editing in OSM and wanted to ask if it would be ok to alter the boundary of the City of London to include the span of the City bridges that cross the Thames. As per the notes section on this page https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London_borough_boundaries , the corporation of the City of London (through Bridge House Estates) controls the whole of Blackfriars Bridge and the boundary covers this off. I've done some research and it would appear that the City of London are responsible for the following (including the of cost of policing them by City of London Police): London Bridge,Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark Bridge along with Tower Bridge and the Millennium Bridge. See http://democracy.cityoflondon.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=395&MID=18311#AI56820

Further having walked across most of these bridges recently it would appear that the City does extend to the southern end of the bridges. The City of London markings and Griffins can be found as you enter the bridges on the south end for the most part (this can be seen Google street view). In affect as soon as you are on these bridges you are in the City, or so it would seem. In any case the City of London Police are funded to police them as per the above link. Would it be ok to alter the City of London boundary to cover these bridges (excepting Tower Bridge see below)?

A very strange oddity is Tower Bridge which is outside the boundary of the City of London but the City of London Police are responsible for policing it and are funded to cover it with the Met responsible for the land on either side. I'm not suggesting for this paricular bridge should be marked as an exclave of the City on OSM but it is very odd.

Any thoughts? PreservedKillick (talk) 11:22, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Hopefully a London expert can respond, but you are right to approach boundary editing with great care. It is easy to mess up and can be complicated to fix. You could try the Talk-GB mailing list as well, referring to this page. Jnicho02 (talk) 10:23, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Using trees data

Has anyone ever considered importing this data into OpenStreetMap? Berrely (talk) 12:38, 19 December 2020 (UTC)