Plans

I heard on the local radio that a large development is being proposed in Brough, a few miles from my home. There was a display in the Brough library about the proposed new homes and commercial area, so I thought I'd go and take a look.

Brough has been very substantially extended over the past ten years. When I was at school there was a very large area of greenhouses given over largely to growing tomatoes and cucumbers and in the summer there were always employment opportunities picking the fruit for anyone who didn't mind being roasted alive in the greenhouses and scratched to bits on the cucumber plants. All of the glasshouses, warehousing and packing sheds have long ago been demolished and a huge new housing estate and a school built there. There have been other new facilities built too, such as a supermarket, health centre and, bucking the national trend, a pub. One of the new facilities is a library and community centre where the plans were on show.

The plans were laid out on display boards, with black and white maps showing Brough and the new roads and building areas sketched over as coloured blocks. I can't reproduce them here for fear of breaking the developer's copyright. The maps were very old OS ones. They showed the market gardens as though they still existed, with the existing, new estate blocked in colour which made it look part of the development. All of the existing, new facilities and some existing roads were drawn in as though they were to be added by the developer. The development that really is to be added is largely on open fields but it is partly on the airfield currently owned and operated by BAe. This is fiercely guarded and is not available for private aircraft to use, so only a few aircraft use it each week. One interesting part of the proposal is to build a new supermarket. Tesco already have expressed an interest in building a supermarket near the A63, not far from this proposed development and the developers are latching on to the hostility to Tesco's plans by saying that their supermarket would be instead of Tesco's planned one.

I have no particular objections to the development, but it is interesting to see how maps are being used to portray a developer's specific agenda and attempt to put them in a good light. As to replacing Tesco's proposal, well Tesco have the cash and planning experience to usually get what they want.

Bridges & stuff

When I look at at KeepRight it flags up all sorts of things including where a road crosses a waterway when there's no bridge. There is a small waterway running through Hull called the Beverley and Barmston Drain. I wasn't sure that all of roads that pass over it did so on bridges rather than it simply running through a culvert of some kind, so we went to take a look. The simple answer is there were bridges everywhere, though the pictured one is actually one we already knew about.

As usual when we go out looking for one thing we discover something else. In this case we saw a new industrial estate which is still being completed and a housing estate that is much bigger than it was the last time we checked. The industrial estate didn't have any road names nor a name for the estate, but I expect this to change as the place is finished. The housing estate (pictured) is also still being developed but at least has a road name and also plenty of mud.

The autumn colours in the trees and bushes have been great this year and in spite of a windy day there are still lots of leaves to be seen.

How fast is Autumn

The roundabout on the A1079 is complete, but the link road from it to the caravan works is not accessible yet. The temporary speed limits have been removed. The new traffic signals on the junctions between the A164 and the A1079 are working and all of this is now in the OSM database.

The leaves are changing colour here, a bit late this year, but they look particularly good. I have heard that spring spreads from the south of England northwards at about walking pace, but does autumn spread south at a similar pace?

Link roads, bugs and limits

We needed some compost for potting up winter plants and I know that a new link road is being built near to the garden centre, so I thought I'd check it out. I know the road is being built because the A1079 has a frustrating new 30 mph speed limits and speed cameras on it. A roundabout is being added to help the link road join into the main road. The link load is, I think, only going to Swift caravans to help them move their raw materials onto their site and especially move the large mobile homes and caravans they produce off site, directly onto a substantial road and not through Cottingham village. The new roads cuts across North Moor Lane, and would have provided a short cut into Cottingham from the A1079, something the planners want to avoid, so North Moor Lane has been cut in half to prevent this rat-run being created.

Part of the reason I looked at this area is that a newbie had added a huge stretch of 30 mph on the A1079 in response to a Skobbler bug report. The 30 mph limit had already been added, but rather than accept that the editor just added extra 30 mph areas. Bug reporting is a great idea, but it would be nice if people would actually visit the reported area before 'fixing' it. I have sorted it out now, but the new roundabout will still need adding when I can get a GPS trace around it.

A little bit of mapping

It's been a quiet mapping time, but today after a discussion about some areas of Hull I found myself checking out some of the ten foots off Spring Bank West. A ten foot is the local name for an alley. They run behind rows of houses which are often terraces so these ten foots give access to the back of the houses. The land that fronts onto the ten foot are almost all garages, maybe at one time it would have been a garden. A few of these alleys have been closed to public access with gates. In fact I have no idea of the access status of an ungated ten foot. They tend to be untidy and unkempt and now the wheelie bins just make things worse. 

Quiet time filled with toads

I've not been out gathering new OSM data very much in the past few weeks. I have been running through the OS Locator list of street names in Hull. Following it up on the ground means I have found streets I had missed first time around and ones that have been built since I last visited. All of this improves the quality of the map. I've been doing the same sort of thing in the villages and towns around Hull, but the East Riding of Yorkshire still has a large amount to do to get to the same level of completeness.

I have been experimenting with different ways to place markers on a slippy map. This was prompted by trying to display the locations of some statues of toads placed in and around Hull as part of the celebrations remembering the poet Philip Larkin who died 25 years ago. You can see one example of my efforts here.

I decided to document the process. I'm learning a lot about OpenLayers and that, as you might expect, there are various ways to do it. I am considering how to build a prompted process that helps people create a map on a web site with markers on it and how to help them make the markers respond to actions. It is interesting and in due course, if I get anywhere, I'll post more here. Someone might like to see the documentation at least but some kind of prompt-and-use system could be useful.

Lancing the boil

SteveC recently wrote a blog entry about the nuisance factor that a small, noisy number of people can cause and how enough is enough. I agree with him that the OSM email lists are almost unusable, being swamped by a few people who seem to want to bring OSM down rather than see it prosper.

One guy, probably using a stupidly obvious pseudonym, comments on almost every email anyone sends, sometimes with more than one reply to the same email and often replies to his own email. You begin to wonder if he has some kind of disorder that needs some help.

Someone else repeats the same mantra over and over. Repeating the same objection and asking the same question over and over doesn't make you insightful, or right and doesn't make your objection or question any more reasonable, it just makes you someone who repeats yourself.

Another guy it seems is a serial project disrupter, having been ejected from Wikipedia. His stock-in-trade seems to be circular arguments backed up with hollow threats to set something up as an alternative to OSM. Sadly he doesn't follow through and remains in OSM to continue to cause trouble.

Some people don't like the proposed change to the new ODbL licence and the accompanying contributor terms.  One way of reinforcing their argument against this change is to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about how much of the imported data will have to be removed from OSM because ODbL is not compatible with the imported data. This is, of course, rubbish; why would the sensible, knowledgeable and very hard-working team who have worked on the new licence recommend something that would mean we lose so much? These trouble-makers are free to reject the new licence when they get asked, but they don't want to be Billy Nomates left in an empty space with their data and no prospect of growth, so they want to scare some others into joining them. A pretty despicable tactic if you ask me.

There are other small-time disrupters, people who argue with each other via the email lists, as though a public argument somehow strengthens their point of view. It doesn't of course, it just shows how childish they can be.

The mailing lists are there to ask for help, disseminate information and to discuss ideas and problems. Almost all of this has been swamped by these trolls. Sadly ordinary OSMers get dragged it to this too. Sometimes the mainstream OSMers have tried to engage with the trolls, but that is just what they want. It's like pouring petrol on a fire. The trolls don't back down in the face of reasoned argument or even firm evidence they just go into email overdrive; they would deny the laws of physics just to fill their sad little worlds with their form of entertainment.

Well I say their entertainment has to come to an end. The lists need moderating. When people are deemed to be outside the norms of behaviour they should be privately warned and if they continue they should be suspended from the list for a few days. When they return, if they continue to behave unacceptably they should be asked (or forced) to leave for at least a month. I know this is fraught with difficulties, but OSM is a do-ocracy, so lets just do it and more than that, tell the world we've done it. Lets make it clear that we are about map data, not a home for trolls.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, these few must act reasonably or expect a reasonable response from the many. If they feel badly treated, let them form their own mailing list or even their own project, and fill that with as much blather as they like.