Go west

We branched out to the west of East Yorkshire, mapping Barmby on the Marsh and a few other places around Howden. It seems that the A614 was not tagged correctly, so I changed some of it. I think I need to follow more of it to check it out. The OSM 'rule' is that in the UK, primary roads that are signed with a green and yellow sign are highway=trunk, primary roads with black and white signs are highway=primary. I don't really like this, but I follow the guidelines to be consistent.

The rules about whether the Highways Agency looks after the road or the local authority does have slowly changed and so the distinction has blurred. It seems to me that all primary routes are getting green and yellow signs when they are renewed, so the useful distinction between primary and trunk is being lost. A good example is the ring road around York. If you were planning a route from Leeds to Scarborough, it looks as though the route to the north of York is as good as the one to the south. In fact the route to the north is horrendously slow, with bottle necks at every junction. I think this should be a primary to distinguish it, but the signs are yellow and green so ...

Some stuff on the mailing lists made me smile today. Someone is manning a stand at a show to demonstrate OSM, and good on him. A local supplier has offered to lend him some Macs to use on the stand, but he's not a Mac user. He asked how OSM works on a Mac and a flurry of people (Mac users can still be described as people) leapt in with comments about how to make their wonderful Mac work well, especially how to configure the mouse to allow a right-click. A Mac has nowadays grown up into being a PC running Linux with a nice GUI, so all should be well if you plug in a proper mouse.