Recently, a one-way road I use has become closed to motor traffic, and is now a two-way cycleway. Because people have been complaining that satnavs have been sending people the wrong way, I though that a day or so after updating openstreetmap, I’d try to notify the commercial mapping companies and see how easy it is to report their routing as inaccurate.

Openstreetmap was the quickest, but I know the tools, I could do it myself, using Potlatch. It showed up on Mapnik in minutes, and routing engines like cyclestreets.net will probably get their routing data refreshed in a day or two.

Google Maps was pretty much the easiest of the commercial providers, from an end-user’s perspective. I plotted a route, and clicked on report a problem with a route, selected the leg of the route, and gave a plain english description of what needed changing, and some oompah loompah’s at the chocolate factory will at some point (probably in a week or two) update their map data, so anyone using Google Maps / Google Navigation won’t be send the wrong way in their motor vehicles. Google Maps already highlighted the fact that the road was temporarily closed for road works (yet it still offered it as a car routing route).

Navteq (now Nokia maps) was reasonably easy, I could select a segment of road, and request tags to be changed to state it’s now two-way and that motorised traffic was not allowed, however, I was not able to tag it as a cycle way. It seems that they don’t do cycle mapping. Garmin users might see the changes in as little as three months from now.

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Over the past two years, TfL have been ‘improving’ the North Circular Road at Bounds Green. About time. It was terrible for pretty much every road user; there have been plans to get this done for decades, and houses along the route had been compulsarily purchased and boarded up years ago.

Now it’s all ‘finished’, and we’re left with mostly dual carriageway throughout, but still with plenty of traffic lights, we’ve now got an attempt at a cycleway along the north side of the road - the sort that peters out at every bus stop, and doesn’t get priority over even the smallest side road.

We’ve still got the horrific traffic jams eastbound through the tunnels on Pinkham Way.

I’ve done an initial pass at remapping the area, with cycleway and crossings done. I think I’ve done all the blocked off roads and turn restrictions too.

At the weekend, I got on my bike, and cycled from London to Oxford. Take a look at a map, and there's a road that starts in London, and goes to Oxford. It's the A40.

Since the M40 was built, much of the A40, certainly from Denham Roundabout to Wheatley has most of it's former traffic on the motorway. This makes it an excellent route for keen long-distance road cyclists.

However, from the Marylebone Flyover to White City, that stretch used to be the A40(M), an urban motorway. Nowadays, it's just the A40, not a motorway any more. Being an intrepid cyclist, I set out to see if it could be cycled along. Technically, and legally, the answer is yes. There are no signs along there saying you can't cycle (or walk, or ride a horse) along the elevated sections.

However, the Marylebone flyover doesn't have a hard-shoulder, nor does the White city flyover. Technically, even cyclists shouldn't be cycling on the hard shoulder, but I doubt that police would stop a cyclist for that.

The speed limit along much of the Westway is currently 40mph, which doesn't make it any worse than cycling along the North Circular Road.

The only other cycle-hostile parts of the route were from Uxbridge roundabout to Denham Roundabout. Though technically legal to cycle the A40 there, there's a sign saying 'Unsuitable for cyclists'. Quite true. Fast moving traffic, a 70mph speed limit, and no hard shoulder.

This leads me to ponder if cycle route planners might want to have a tag for roads that, while technically legal, are termed hostile, and not recommended for novice cyclists eg. bicycle=hostile, or whether this could be implied by the speed limit and other factors?

I've just removed bicycle=no from the Westway, because it was untrue from a technical and legal standpoint. Suggestions welcome from anyone involved in cycle routing using OSM data.

Yesterday, I was cycling along the Old Bailey - not my usual route to work, and noticed a lack of something.

A whole block had been razed to the ground by developers in some redevelopment scheme.

While I was editing Openstreetmap to reflect the new state of reality, I felt like a vandal. All those POIs relfecting all the businesses along that block that had been carefully mapped by other mappers were deleted, a service road deleted. In it's place now lies a bit landuse=construction.