Oh, just seen the new "changeset" feature
osm.org/browse/changeset/873751
and the new menu option showing the edits that people have made.

Looks good!

Excellent news! Just uploaded my first 0.6 changeset - although I seem to be having trouble downloading gpx points. I presume that'll speed up once the changes have bedded in?

You'd obviously need to be a bit careful - e.g. St could be "Saint" or "Street". There are a few places in the World with "Ave" in the name and are not abbreviations. Not everyone uses the same abbreviations. etc.

Now removed and a quick message sent to the culprit - User:BentleyCoon

I've had a quick look at your trace - and the first part of your trace has trackpoints without any timestamp - which will be rejected. The rest looks fine - and looks like what I get from my Vista when I write tracks to the microSD card.

Looks likely that the first set of points have been saved as the other Richard said - which strips the timestamps out.

You could put dummy timestamps on these points using something like a text editor or a spreadsheet even. Apparently the "sendmap" program can do this as well - although I don't use it myself. Once you've done that, the rest of the points should be accepted by the server.

I reached the million sometime around August or thereabouts, in the days when you only needed around 800-900k to get on the top 50 board. Now over 1.6million and counting. Only had the GPS unit since Christmas '07... Maybe I have OSMCD. Now you need to have about 50% more trackpoints to get on the top-50 list - just four or five months later. Amazing how OSM has grown (pushing up to nearly 90,000 registered users as well).

Oh, and surely you don't need to store large edits locally - if someone delets loads of data then it could be restored from a recent Planet.osm file.

Um, doesn't Potlatch have an undelete function? It certainly used to. If you press something like "U" then it highlighted in red any way that had been deleted.

If you can map it as a building - then map it as a building. Don't be afraid to go against Map Features.

DavidDean: Yes of course, but there are some roads that no OSM-ers will otherwise travel on for many years in some cases, apart from when they're doing systematic mapping. Even though there are quite a lot of us these days, there still aren't *that* many in the grand scheme of things. These roads would give very odd results when you tried to do any kind of analysis to them. In addition, roads that are travelled by others will be tainted with this odd data, which might be difficult to tell it apart from heavy traffic in places.

I doubt we'll get to the stage that we'll be able to do much useful traffic analysis with this data anytime soon - especially as much of it has been done on foot or by bike (how do you know if one has been done by bike or has been done in a car in relatively heavy traffic?).

If I'm doing a long-distance journey somewhere - or a journey to somewhere more local that I know hasn't got many traces - then I'll definitely put the GPS in the car, but I don't record my daily trip to work and back each day (but of course I've done it once or twice).

If we want to do traffic analysis - then we need lots of data covering all days of the week, all times of the day, and the entire road network ideally. This might be better as a separate (but connected) project?

Oh, and population is a bad way of determining importance on the map. A town of 10,000 people near to a major city is often insignificant locally, but a town of 1,000 people in rural Wales at the junction of two or more major roads is very significant locally. Judgement is required, not raw population figures (even if we could get that information free from copyright)

Just to put the record straight here - St. David's is a city *NOT* because it has a cathedral. That hasn't been used as a way of determining which place is a city or not for around 150 years.

St. David's became a city only in 1994. City status is awarded by the monarch and usually places apply to be considered upon special events.

e.g. the last two times when a town could apply to become a city were in the Millennium in 2000 and for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002.

You've got no excuse, smsm1 - you can trace 5-times quicker than me...

David, you say "of all time?" - yes, it is an all-time list - however you'll notice number 1 on the list is "Lost GPX traces" - for some reason at the back end of 2007 a number of GPX traces were mysteriously wiped from the database (including my first ever trace from September 2007). They were all recovered - but without any data about who they came from - so they were all placed in this one user account. You could get them back if you knew what they were called or what tags they had.

i.e. some people may have actually uploaded more than the database currently says.

You say multiple traces are useful for traffic modelling - hmm, if they did that in half the areas I've mapped then they'll believe that all users turn left every time they get to a side turning and they stop randomly at post-boxes, pubs, churches, schools, etc.

Having said that, multiple traces, particularly taken on different days, are useful for "averaging out" position errors in individual traces - and I'm sure in future the likes of JOSM will be able to do some averaging by looking at the density of traces.

On the other hand, my residential cul-de-sac probably has a higher density of traces than the nearest 8-lane motorway a few miles away...

Ahh, but you couldn't have any satellites orbiting a flat Earth - and without satellites there would be no OSM - therefore it does affect your daily life. QED

Hmm, I know that area very well. I used to go up to Llyn Brenig a lot - although not for quite some time.

I think you can still access the road all the way up to the edge of the lake - where there is now a car park - but the B-road curves north to avoid the lake.

Since I downloaded a new version of JOSM - I've not been able to get the NPE layer either. It just comes up with "Exception Occurred". I don't think it's anything to do with Firefox - because I have FF2. Only the NPE layer doesn't work. The NPE layer worked when I had an older version of JOSM (and also an older version of the WMS plugin).

If you're tracing something fairly small - and you can align to existing traces nearby - the error is not going to be that large when tracing from JOSM - especially if you align regularly. The main thing that bugs me about the Potlatch NPE stuff is that you can only view the NPE maps at zoom level z=14 - and it's almost impossible to do anything resembling an accurate trace at that level. Is it possible to offer NPE at, say, z=16 to z=18. Yes it'll probably be a bit pixellated - but it would still be useful.

Could they be streets which have been removed for redevelopment? I bet some of that TIGER data is pretty old, so wouldn't be out of the question.

I came across a place earlier this year in the UK where an entire area, previously run-down council-owned housing, had been demolished and had all the roads dug up ready for full scale redevelopment.

The renderings of paths on Osmarender *used* to be;
Yellow way = footpath (coincident with yellow waymarks on UK footpaths)
Blue way = bridleway (coincident with blue waymarks on UK bridleways)
Red way = byway (coincident with red waymarks on UK byways)

The red and blue still exists - but someone changed the one for footpaths to a dirty brown/grey colour...

That should of course by Stalybridge, not Staylbridge...

To eAi: It is a pity that no-one has done Staylbridge and surroundings indeed. I'll point out now that I was doing the area around Hadfield for a specific purpose, and I didn't venture much outside the area that I was meant to be mapping for that purpose.

All I was saying is; it's not as difficult as you think to get a considerable amount done - but someone has to just go and do it. It can be done.

When you next go to Honiton, take a GPS with you, make sure that you put a few roads on the map, and perhaps get out walking one day and put a few footpaths on, or get on the bike etc. You don't have to do everything in one go. If every OSMer who visits Honiton or the surrounding area does the same, then eventually it'll get finished.