Shame about your bad experience. Hopefully the issues you faced get resolved soon.

At least with OSM there's a few ways to do everything so we can work around problems and find a workflow that works :).

So you think that it's a better idea to just have "highway=lowest" then have it defined as residential/unclassified/whatever by what landuse is marked around it?

Personally I think it's a bit of a moot point for the time being as the renderers don't seem to differentiate between residential and unclassified. Also, getting the data there in the first place is a much higher priority than nitpicking over exactly what it should be classes as.

Upon the advice of user davidearl I made a JOSM ticket for the area paint tool here.

Track is fine for fire trails, the problem is that these streets are very firmly residential. As in, they have houses on both sides at no more than 20-30m apart.

If there's a consensus that any unpaved surface could be marked as track I would be happy to follow that convention, but currently the OSM data convention is to label the way with the most appropriate purpose, leave a surface=unpaved tag then let the renderer use an unpaved linetype.

Unfortunately neither Mapnik or Osmarender use a different linetype to differentiate between paved and unpaved. No doubt it's been debated on the appropriate mailing list.

Perhaps we need an Australian convention as it may be possible that in developed parts of Europe an unpaved residential street is so uncommon that it's not considered important.

Anyway, whatever happens the data is there for anybody to interpret as they wish, so the hard work is done.

The obscene accuracy presented in the co-ordinate system by JOSM really goes a bit too far, yes. Glancing at a BBOX measurement and the latitude was reported to no less that 13 decimal places. A back of an envelope calculation shows this to be precision to, oh, about 1/10th of the width of a hydrogen atom.

From memory a 6dp truncation of lat/long leads to a ~10cm grid near the equator.

The trouble is that from a programming perspective JOSM just uses basic floating point functions, in order to do such a truncation requires jumping through lots of rings programming wise.

But yeah, a, say, 1m "snap to grid" would be useful, however it's very rare that a building will line up exactly with the lat/long grid, so it may be a waste of time. Perhaps a tool which orthoganises an area but allows you to force arbitrary segments to be parallel (ie, side of a building to the street next to it) would be a big step up.

Personally I'd love to see an "area paint" function which allows you to click in the middle of, say, 4 intersecting ways and say "everything in there is landuse=blah" and it automatically draws an area in parallel to each way with a pre-defined offset of ~5m or so. Kind of like the Photo editing "bucket of paint" tool.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Good to hear I'm not alone up here :). Evans head streets are ~50% done but it wouldn't be more than an hours driving/cycling to finish them off. Have fun up there! Feel free to adjust the riverbanks as they were traced off un-geolocated landsat imagery.

Yeah, I tend to do that. At least I have recently, which one were you looking at? The rivers through Lismore were traced about 18 months ago, long before the ABS import, and need to be re-done.

I can't wait for this to start being deployed because it will be an *excellent* way to increase the user base of OSM, not to mention be a big boost to the usefulness of Wikipedia.

Everyone knows that blogging is more for the writer than the reader ;).

Where are the multipolygons? I've done a few and could help debug them.

Have fun with all those nonames. It's amazing how much faster it is collecting pre-traced street names than it is tracing everything. Pretty much everything's been traced by now, but all those people who were against mindless street tracing had obviously never compared the two mapping methods.

It's probably more of an incentive to be honest. I'm training to do cycle touring, so the longer distances will be really handy.

My current goal is to get the rest of Goonellabah and Casino done before heading back to Newcastle.

Casino is about a 60km round trip, plus whatever mapping distance is done while out there.

I'll think about doing Ballina as well but being a coastal town it's more likely to be covered by someone else.

Welcome to OSM, have fun with your new hobby :).

Good to see OSM gaining a bit more momentum in Australia. Our low population density means we need all the help we can get!

Altitude calibration is for any hand held unit which has a barometric altimeter in it. Ie, one which estimates altitude based on changes in air pressure.

Garmin units which have the required hardware include the eTrex Vista HCx (top of the line eTrex) and several of the Summit units.

Daily? Damn that's pretty heavy for a high intensity ride. Laverty's Gap had my heart rate at 180bpm for the whole climb in lowest gear on the MTB...Not tried it again since then.

It would be nice to get a feel for this progress. Like have a wiki page which lists all of the towns in a state (maybe already compiled in Wikipedia?) and sorts them into something like: completely blank, major highway only, highway and some streets, all streets surveyed + named, all streets plus many POI's.

Good luck with the country roads...It's a lot of work!

Yeah, it's nice being able to cycle more than 50m before having to stop and photograph something.

It can be challenging in parts, but the area within ~40km of lismore isn't too bad. The elevation profile of this ride peaked at ~200m. And that was riding up a plateau then back down again. I once did a MTB ride out of Mullum that went from ~10m to...*drumroll*...820m*. I was dead for a few days after that one.

*Mullum -> Huonbrook, North Rocks Road, historic nightcap track, returning through the back of Huonbrook.

I like JOSM and haven't had many problems with it. But I also have a bit of AutoCAD and vi experience and chances are that helps a lot.

Just try forcing one hand on the keys and one on the mouse. JOSM is especially fast for tagging ways:

s

hi
re

(as the "add button remains highlighted after clicking it)
na
type name

Once you've done it 20 times your muscle memory makes it a very fast process.

I think it's mainly because I'm heavy (105kg) and hence really hard on bike gear. Such is life.

Just did some research: it does use WiFi by comparing your IP to a database of known access points. So it only works if you're using a public AP which is in the database.

So really it's nothing special that couldn't be done before with netstat, traceroute, and an IP geolocation database.

How on Earth would it use WiFi signals? Using the mobile phone network I could understand as you can triangulate if the phone is getting a signal from 3 or more towers, but WiFi has no geographic data attached to it.

...there are many like it, but this one is mine.

Welcome to OSM :).