I just realised it has been 18 months since I made a diary entry! Rather than writing diary entries, I have been busy mapping. It has been over a year since Andrews Bridge at Birchville collapsed (on 29 October 2015) and I subsequently mapped this in OSM, along with the then proposed emergency access road that the Upper Hutt City Council had commenced building. Within days of me adding the proposed road as an OSM way another OSM mapper had plotted it using GPS! I was impressed. And the road was still being built, too! (This even motivated me to get my own GPS unit.) Since then I have been back and forth over this Private Road many time, usually with my own GPS unit plotting my track. (One day I should upload these tracks to OSM.)

A few days ago I sort of fell over the OSM Inspector and went back and looked at some of the work I had done over the last 18 months. I came across a few issues, but nothing that I couldn’t correct fairly easily, except that Bridge Road remains an island, despite being connected to the rest of the world by a “Private Road” even though I have changed the tags on the way to indicate there is designated restricted access rather than the road actually being “private”.

I suppose this OSM Inspector issue actually makes sense. Because the Private Road is not tagged as a public road so there is no publicly available routing to Bridge Road. Hopefully the issue will be resolved once the new bridge is installed - I am told - at the end of the month. Currently only the foundations are in place. So I think I will need to wait until opening day, so I can walk across the new bridge while plotting a GPS track.

Realignment to Bing imagery. Added cutting at start of the road. Added bridge over Clarke’s Creek and extended the waterway to the Hutt River. Also realigned Birch Terrace on opposite side of the river to join Akatarawa Road, not Rata Street and add open drain that was not shown. Also reshaped Birchville Dam reservoir. Not perfect, as some significant alignment discrepancies compared to LINZ plotted features, such as cliff edges on the river. Probably needs some GPS traces to plot features more accurately.

I started off with the intention of mapping a few walkways near Wallaceville Railway Station and things sort of developed from there. Once I had aligned the imagery to the railway line between Ward and Blenheim Street crossings, I found that several nearby streets did not align with road centrelines, although others in the same area did align. Have made several small adjustments to various features, often moving road centrelines less than a road width (perhaps 3 or 4 metres) to line things up with road markings. And it just went on from there, as I saw more and more little discrepancies, incorrect and incomplete information. and missing parking areas, building outlines and other features. I can see myself taking a good walk around town with a new set of mapping eyes on and taking note of what I see.

Added a couple of buildings and public toilets at the Birchville Picnic Area, Upper Hutt, New Zealand. Also corrected the entrance to the cycle trail by moving the junction with Akatarawa Road back about 30 metres from the Gemstone Drive intersection, This is my first attempt at editing OpenStreetMap.