Thanks for the information David, I wasn't aware of the current status as it has changed from the original schedule and I've not kept up to date, other than knowing that the buses hadn't yet started running.

You raise an interesting point about trespassing. I was motivated to do the survey after seeing other cyclists on the route, so if it was trespassing then (a) I'm not alone, (b) there is no clear indication on the ground that this is the case, and (c) it raises an interesting question. If I come across a route which is clearly marked as a cycle route - which this is - then is it not a fair assumption that it is a public right of way and that I'm allowed on it? After all, OSM is about mapping what we see on the ground, which in this case includes such signs in full view. I'd presume that if it's still technically private then these signs should not be there (or at least should be covered up, as you often see at construction sites on motorways for example). There were clear signs that you should keep off the guideway itself at the eastern end. What's more, some of it (between Park Lane (Histon) and Oakington in particular) was previously a right of way in any case, and I didn't see any signs stating that the right of way had been temporarily suspended due to construction works (although previously this was only a public footpath which cycles were not allowed on, if I remember correctly).

With respect to the issue of paths that 'disappear' and 'reappear' where it is unclear where to go for a section of the path, I wondered if a pragmatic solution to this is to map a straight line between the known reference points of the path, but add a tag to that section (extrapolated=yes?) to indicate that the exact location is not clear from evidence on the ground. That way, any routing algorithms will still be able to use the data in a meaningful way, but renderers can choose not to render data with this tag.

For that matter, this issue doesn't just apply to paths. I used my GPS to log some main roads in Peru, and there are a few sections where I know there is a road but I didn't manage to get a log for whatever reason. As these roads are the only access to some of the towns in the area it's really important for routers to know that it's a valid route, even if the exact trajectory of the road between two points is not known.

I saw there was a new estate taking shape in the Aspen Way area, but the last time I visited I didn't have time to map more than a few stubs on the edge. As for Brewhouse Lane I honestly can't remember now - another one for my list of places to check.

Lion Mill was in the area between Clay Street, Mill Drove and Lode Close:
osm.org/?lat=52.3318&lon=0.33443&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF

I think the housing development may be complete now - I drove past it at night but didn't attempt to map it, but as it's a small area I don't think it's more than a handful of residential streets.

Nice work!

My friend in Soham has just pointed out that the former Lion Mill site is now a new housing estate within the area that I previously surveyed, so also needs adding. Should take no more than about 15 minutes to survey on foot as it's pretty small, I'll make a point of doing this next time I visit.

Nice work, good to see the parts that I cycled past last year finally on the map! I managed to get a small amount of mapping done in Soham at the weekend. Essentially there is still a large new estate in the north which needs mapping and the whole of the southern end of the town. Probably one long or two short sessions should do it. Now the weather is better I hope to get it done in the next month or so.

That's odd - I did my usual Monday morning comparison of Mapnik and Osmarender to see the differences, and there were none - it looks as if it's already rendered in Mapnik, despite a Wednesday not yet having passed since the data were added. Any idea why? Nice work though.

I was wondering what had happened there, I'd checked back from time to time to see if it had been added but had also concluded that the person had lost interest. Still, all sorted now and looks good.

Hi Mark,
Thanks for the tip about the path from Long Drive/Joist fen to the river, I'll check that out sometime when I try and map the lakes properly. Looks like there might actually be a few tracks from Long Drove in that direction, but not sure how many of them are navigable as far as the river.

You're a unicyclist too?!!!! I've never really got to do much off-road as my skills haven't really got good enough, but I must admit I hadn't thought of using it to do mapping!

Cheers,
Donald

OK to start the ball rolling I've added initial county pages on the wiki for Devon, Dorset and Somerset. Still a lot of detail to add, and I haven't looked up any lists of towns to add. That's a job for a long winter's evening!

I think the problem will to a large extent remain until a local person in the area gets interested and starts doing 'real' mapping using a GPS. I am unfortunate (if you see what I mean) to live in an area with a lot of mappers , which means my home patch is very well covered and I have to travel quite a way to get rich pickings. I grew up in the area a little to the east of where you're looking and have added a few of the roads I know based on NPE maps, but the problem remains.

I wonder if there's scope here for organising 'out of region' mapping parties, to cover towns/villages in such areas - and trying to publicise it locally as much as possible. The main aim of such a party would be to get locals interested, and give them a bit of a head start by letting them see how it's done, as opposed to actually getting blanket coverage of the region. However I'm not really an expert in publicity matters, so don't know how best to go about this. Having been to the Bury St. Edmunds mapping party in August, I would love to see a similar event in say Yeovil (near where I grew up and which I know well) which is a similar sized town and notable for its lack of detail in OSM.

Ah, it certainly looked like the area had received some dedicated attention, compared to the English side of the Wye which is more or less a white hole here. My contribution was pretty small really, but so enjoyable that I'm tempted to go back and do more. I seem to be turning into more of a rural mapper these days, which maybe is a good thing as urban areas will get filled in pretty quickly. Having said that, I'm tempted to go and finish off more of Bury St. Edmunds, as it was 'my' sector that was left with the largest proportion unmapped back in August!

Nice work! I was also out Saturday morning, and now have the Ouse valley way as far as Earith. Also took in a few other footpaths and bridleways. Progress seems painfully slow when walking compared to cycling, but it's the only way to do footpaths accurately. Also tweaked the B1050 just south-east of Earith as it wasn't very accurate, and tagged the lock underneath it road, although it doesn't seem to render at all.

I just remember that my right boot has a split in it*, so I always have a wet right foot as it's in the water as I walk round the lake/coast/riverbank.

(*Actually, so does my left boot now, so I may find it harder to remember in future!).

I have recently bought a Garmin etrex Legend HCX, and am finding it to be excellent. It's £170 or so but there are cheaper models in the etrex range, which should be fairly similar. The HCX means 'H' - High sensitivity receiver, 'C' - colour display, 'X' - External memory card. There are cheaper models which lack one or more of these features. I can't comment on Mac compatibility, but the Micro-SD card file system is mounted automatically in Ubuntu Linux, I would expect similar functionality in any other decent operating system. I've got a handlebar mount for it (bought on ebay) which is great, the colour display is good quality and it's relatively intuitive to use. What's more, I've downloaded an OSM map onto the memory card, which it then uses as its base map. Great for seeing which streets/paths are already on the map!

Nice work! The area is running out of places still to do, although I've got Witchford, Little Downham, Sutton, Mepal and of course Soham (which just seems to be eluding me at the moment) on my mental to-do list. However I was having a look around the rest of the country to get a feel for how complete we are - it was unfortunately a rather depressing experience.

I have downloaded and installed the necessary packages and it seems fairly straight forward, although as it's on a PC that's not that well suited to the workload I haven't yet requested an Upload password. Also if as chasu suggests it's not the real problem, then it won't make the slightest bit of difference. I had a look at osmarender last night - was rendering some experimental changes locally, this is probably the best way of achieving what I originally wanted, i.e. to make sure that changes render OK). However the bottleneck remains. If it's at the server there is probably little that I personally can do. Would require some software optimisations on the server, more expensive hardware, or a re-archtecture to allow the load to be shared among multiple servers.

This doesn't seem to work on firefox 3 beta 5 - the URL you get is:

http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Tiles/info.php?x=1976%201327%2012&y=&z=

i.e. it hasn't separated the numbers properly. Any suggestions?

One thing I've found is that there are a large number of hidden paths/footpaths/woodlands/lakes, some of which I've stumbled across while cycling/walking a route, others I've seen on the yahoo imagery. I think the thing that has worked well for me is to study the yahoo imagery and other maps of the area to look for likely interesting features before actually setting out, but not mapping them. You then have a good idea of what you might be looking for, and this has made things a lot more interesting for me. As well as finding the features you've seen you will also find other features you'd not spotted. You will find yourself doing lots of detours to figure out what that lump of the yahoo imagery really is for example.

When it comes to actually doing the map you then have the knowledge of exactly what there is in a particular location, and can do it all in one go, using the aerial imagery as a guide.

There will be a delay before changes appear on Mapnik, as they are only scheduled for rendering periodically - I understood this to be once per week but from my experience it seems to take anything up to 3 weeks before they appear.

Good to see more of the outlying towns/villages near Cambridge getting some attention. I've all but finished off Cottenham now and was thinking of tackling Soham in the next few weeks - which is in desperate need of some mapping. Out of interest, have you found an easy and practical way to record street names while cycling (which I presume is your normal method)?