Thanks @Stereo. I’m only human, so that comment helps encourage me a lot.

Gaah! The street is West View Road, not West End View (we cannot edit mistakes in comments, unlike posts).

(road patches) is that for the place shown in the photo?

Hi @wyrmon, I’ve just checked for you. Whilst the the Church is the same one that would claim any Chancel tax (‘Gedling’), the road in the photo above is different. That road is Chatsworth Avenue. The photo was taken from just above where Cambridge Street and Burlington Road meet Chatsworth Avenue on the northern slope at the eastern end of Marshall Hill. The embarrassing thing for Gedling Borough Council is that all 3 of those roads are their responsibility, and thus they are responsible for those useless road patches.

The chap that I spoke to lives in West End View, which is further to the east; at that point Marshall Hill has sloped down & a valley + a road (Gedling Road) passes through North-South. This is a photo of West End View:

It is typical for unadopted roads like West End View to be in a very poor state of repair, but you may notice that West End View is in better shape than that patch of Chatsworth Avenue!

Hi @skquinn

I wrote the piece on Ecclesiastical Parishes after interviewing the Revd at St James, Porchester (I believe that he may also have a position at Gedling church). After he explained the situation re: marriages I said “Ah, so there’s still not a full separation between church & state yet, then”. I knew nothing of the Chancel Tax at that stage, but he gave me a very dirty look.

I’m quite sure that congregations in the US are responsible for financially supporting their church - after all, who else is going to do it? In the UK, the Chancel Tax would originally have been perfectly reasonable, as those that owned land had pots of money to help support their church. Today, every middle-class family aspires to own their own home, but very few attend church. They worship a different god altogether.

The tragedy for the Wallbanks was in part to live in a parish that had been almost entirely denuded of parishioners, which meant that they had a perfectly unfair portion of the tax to pay. The sole bright spot in their story may be that, because of it, the Chancel tax may become the Cancelled tax.

Using 10966 2016-09-05 22:21:00 under Debian:

I use copy (Ctrl-C) + paste (Ctrl+V) all the time, mostly with houses but also other objects. Works fine, no problems.

@Vincent de Phily: > (unadopted roads)
It’d be great if you had the time to write a wiki page explaining what it is

That is the sort of thing that I save for times when it’s impossible to work outdoors mapping. Now that it is September I’m sure that such times will soon arrive (although fixing the JOSM plugin terracer is first).

@Vincent de Phily:
thanks for the link to the OSM Help site; no info there yet on unadopted roads. That site was impressive for me due to it’s auto-redirect from the HTTP link that you gave to a HTTPS url. That is the behaviour that I complained in my original post that the OSM Wiki site neglected to perform.

Hi @maxerickson

You provide compelling evidence to back up @Vincent de Phily’s assertion on use/no use of noexit=yes. Looks like I need to change my practice with that. Bugger! I cannot recall specifics on that diary entry, which raises suspicion that my recall is faulty (would not be the first time, but is still damn annoying).

You can improve your search results by modifying your use of the site parameter; never enter the protocol, normally forget the sub-domain & path:

site:openstreetmap.org/user/ noexit=yes => 9 results
site:openstreetmap.org/ noexit=yes => 377 results

Checking out the above also allowed me to spot the wiki for noexit.

Thanks for your input; most helpful. I’m still waiting for input on unadopted roads, however.

@Vincent de Phily:

What’s an “unadopted road” ?

The following comes from a UK Government publication:

‘Unadopted’ roads are those roads not maintained by a highway authority as defined by Highways Act 1980

For most unadopted residential roads the duty to maintain it falls to the frontagers, ie the owners of the property fronting that road, which may include those where the side, or length, of their property fronts the unadopted road.

Local taxes are often lower for unadopted roads, as the occupiers can be responsible for road maintenance. Thus, one of the clear signs of an unadopted road is it’s exceptionally poor state of repair.

I’ll add some of the above into the post.

Whilst I cannot recall the specifics, a Diary post on (I think) USA routing problems mentioned continual difficulties with cul-de-sacs missing noexit=yes. Since reading that post I religiously add that value to each cul-de-sac.

Thanks @Math1985.

Maybe it is due to Google Translate (using Chromium), but I found it nearly unreadable.

Me, last comment:

if there are zero other effective methods to achieve the desired result, practical folks will take the route that works

Here is an illustration of the attitude of mind that I’m talking about (it’s not pretty, but it works):

@Vincent de Phily:

I don’t think that diaries are the right medium for spam warnings : people reading them are looking for news about OSM, not routine admin stuff.

I agree fully. However, if there are zero other effective methods to achieve the desired result, practical folks will take the route that works. I see a lot of crying for the moon; Engineers like practicality. For me, Effective wins every time. This particular mini-story is a perfect exemplar for the way in which OSM gets attenuated (‘made thin’) & deprived of air. I think that perhaps the story of Alexander & the Gordian knot has application here, although I’m deeply pessimistic as to any actual solution.

Hi @Vincent de Phily

Well, no disrespect, my friend, but that link seems a complete waste of time. The oldest entry when I look at it is a user since 10 February, 2015; zero traces, zero map entries. I x diary entry to get a link to his Profile, which contains a link to his site. Spam, lovely Spam, yet zero action for 18 months.

Meanwhile, this public entry has seen both users removed in less than 24 hours. That’s more like it.

Hi there, @NathanO

It’s your map, my friend, so fix it! I use a £20 GBP android smartphone + osmtracker (free). Once you set the track going it will drop breadcrumbs (create a GPX export once complete, which you can pull into JOSM) and you can measure that street exactly. Alter it so it is correct. Not too difficult, and deeply satisfying to fix. Add the houses + house-numbers & other interesting stuff whilst you are at it.

Hi @MiroJanosik

You write: “do walking sessions while it is summer and you can feel your fingers”. Um, isn’t it Summer in Slovakia right now?!

Mistakes: we are human, try to put up with it whilst you learn. I found myself having to redo all the time, but slowly I got better.

PS
An hour for each street sounds about right. It takes a terrifying amount of time to survey on the ground.

I’ve just added the data slice for the Population cores of Britain. The average is 58% unparished, but even that hides the fact that most of the large cities in Britain are 100% unparished and thus, I assert, have utterly poor LSN because of it.

Hi @chillly

The data on this page is all drawn from the same source, OS Boundary Line open data released 21/03/2016.

I’ve put all the info into a spreadsheet to make it possible to pull out different views. I’m happy to release that spreadsheet to anybody that will be able to put it up for open download.

The info for NE Lincs is 79% Parished, 21% unparished.

(I’ve just discovered some info)…

On 12:05 22 Aug @smsm1 said: > (in Edinburgh) the geocoding (is producing) exceptionally weird results, which was causing people to stop using OSM based services such as CycleStreets

If you have a look through the data you will see that the CITY_OF_EDINBURGH is a Unitary Authority and is entirely Unparished. It therefore has zero admin_level=10 areas, and is a prime candidate for all the problems set out in this post.

For information:

1. 16:21 21 August 2016: I notified The Maarssen Mapper here, in a reply to his comment, that all files on his site ‘had been removed’ (a very poor choice of language - a more accurate statement would have been that every GPX file on his site gave a 404 response).
2. 21:14 21 August 2016: A HEAD check by me on a GPX URL is flawless, and I assume that all files are now available. That is yet another wrong assumption (I’m getting good at that): the URL that I used was one used previously and thus was known good.
3. 14:33 22 August 2016: I discover the site is still yielding 404s and, damn annoyed, examine the source. The final (sometimes, two final) forward slashes (‘/’) of all URLs have been swapped for Windows-style back-slashes (‘\’). Rewriting a sample index.html page turns every URL from a 404 to a legitimate source for a GPX file.
4. 23 August 2016: rather than expecting him to read these comments, I send The Maarssen Mapper a message from his Home page on my discoveries. He instantly responds & fixes the problem. Once again, all URLs on all pages are legit.

Hi @SomeoneElse

God, I hate it when someone is correct in an opinion that differs from me. However, I do still adhere to the opening premise of this Diary entry, which I would paraphrase as follows:

“LSN in OSM requires an area to be effective, and the most likely area that it will use is admin_level=10”.

“LSN” is used deliberately in the article to both avoid unfairly fixing the blame on Nominatim and also provide a smokescreen for my ignorance, as I’ve seen clear indications in the last 5 months that a great many different services are used to provide LSN facilities, and I have zero idea as to how they all interact together. I also have great confusion in that I cannot seem to drill down to the Nominatim code.

I’ve found sufficient evidence to indicate that the primary factor in LSN results is the presence of an admin_level=10 area (BoundaryLine). The fact of contra-indications means that other, as yet unknown, factors are also at play.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have some proper, documented help? (and here comes yet more controversy…). My experience of too many software writers is that they believe code to be for real men, whilst documentation is for wimps.