Visiting parents in Leicester for Easter. Weather is quite bad, so no cycle mapping (yet). On Thursday, we got the new alignment of Oxford Street around the Newark Magazine Gateway - the day it opened!

Today we drove around the villages of south-east Leicestershire, around Burton Overy and The Langtons, picking up various country roads. This area was pretty bare before.

I'm very glad to have seen other people being active in the Leicester area recently. Countesthorpe, Markfield, Wigston and Braunstone all seem to have had significant stuff added to them. Yay.

more mapping yesterday (not sure how much) and today (15 miles).

Wednesday afternoon saw me ride to Belgrave and fill in gaps between my stuff there from Tuesday and what was there already, and then I went north of Gipsy Lane and did bits and pieces there as well. There's still a lot to do here, but the gap is narrowing.

Thursday afternoon, I mapped the West End of Leicester. This, like much of the Belgrave Road area, is a densely built-up area of terraced housing, and consequently is very intensive to map. I did nearly the entire section east of Fosse Road and north of the railway line.

This afternoon I did 13.8 miles of mapping, which is about as much as I've done in a single session. St Matthew's was ticked off the list, as well as the Syston Street/Cobden Street industrial areas. I started going up the Belgrave/Catherine Street ladder but didn't quite link up with the existing stuff there.

Day off tomorrow. Thursday will probably be West End mappage.

In Leicester for the week. 12 miles mapping done in afternoon. Did bit of South Highfields and Evington Valley, such that there is now an area of continuous completion all the way from the city centre out to the eastern suburbs.

Did most of the missing bits of Leicester City Centre today, leaving only one or two minor cul-de-sacs to do within the inner ring-road. Also did the St Margaret's industrial estate between the ring-road and the river, and then the Tudor Road area.

My GPS reception was dreadful in the Duke Street area, so I've got the topology right but the positioning is going to be dreadful - a combination of quite tall buildings with narrow streets. This may warrant either proper surveying or someone with a better GPS re-doing it.

more mapping in the NorthEvington/Spinney Hills/Crown Hills/Evington Valley area this morning/lunchtime, followed by in the afternoon going to Glen Parva and sorting out the missing bit of NR6 between the end of the Great Central Way and the cyclepath to Blaby.

two quite long sessions today. did the Rowlatts Hill estate in morning and then in the afternoon started on North Evington/Spinney Hills.

around 18 miles mapping today. did two areas: in the morning the area around De Montfort University/Filbert Street/Freeman's Meadow/Bede Island South, and then in the afternoon the Davenport Road area and the roads around Humberstone Park.

Finished Thurnby Lodge today. Will need to come back in the spring to do all the footpaths and stuffs in the parks.

Yesterday I accidentally went to Mountsorrel. It could happen to anyone. Still, at least NCN route 6 is done as far as there, now. Also, filled in the gap in NCN route 63 between De Montfort University and the University of Leicester.

Today I did the section between the railway line, the A563 ringroad, Gipsy Lane, and to the east the Victoria Road East Extension. The latter opened in 2005 and is only just starting to show in webmapping, despite being a major link road and forming part of the primary A6030.

Tomorrow I think I'll do the area west of the railway line, forming a link to the already-complete area in Belgrave.

14.5 miles of bicycle riding in West Humberstone and Northfields means that I've done all the roads in that area. This is much flatter ground than the areas I did before, hence the improved progress. Have to come back at some point to get all the footpaths I didn't get this time.

This marks the completion of a continuous region from the railway line in the west to the city border and open countryside in the east.

Yesterday I did a fair chunk of Humberstone and today I did a little corner of Evington around the Waitrose that hadn't been done.

Most of today's mapping was tracing National Cycle Network route 63. We drove out eastwards to get it as far to the outskirts of Oakham, where we unfortunately lost it. Luckily, #osm was able to provide photographic evidence of its course within Oakham, courtesy of the Rutland Mapping Weekend. Later, I cycled along its course west along the former Leicester and Swannington Railway, and then as far as the Groby Road Roundabout.

On the way to Oakham, we also found where the 64 and the National Byway share part of route 63 for a while - between Goadby (where they come from the south) and Knossington (where they go off again to the west).

Finished Hamilton today.

Tomorrow I will try for the last few bits of the city centre.

Hamilton today. Got the cyclepaths that criss-cross it down (far more extensive network that I'd expected), and then mapped residential streets in the northern part.

Managed 10 miles in around 2.5 hours (not counting travel to/from), getting better.

This morning I finished Netherhall, and did a bit of Hamilton next to it. Then, this afternoon, the eastern part of Thurnby Lodge, east of Bowhill Grove/Willowbrook Park. Getting a bit better at hills now.

Tomorrow's plan is to do more of Hamilton. Hamilton is a new suburb north-east of Leicester, at which house-building has been going on for over ten years, and still being actively built. It still has pretty poor coverage in the TeleAtlas dataset which most online mapping is using. Shouldn't take long to better it.

took the bike out for a bit of a spin today, did some of netherhall. quite light traffic so good for reacquainting myself with riding. some non-nice gradients, though.

The OPSI have confirmed that there is nothing to stop me comparing the DfT's list of green roads against our list of green roads, and correcting things based on it.

Woot!

IH&T run one of the better stories I've seen about satnavs directing HGVs down little village roads.

I recently added maxweight and maxheight to the things I note down when I see them. It might be nice to get these renderered. If we just added them to the default rendering, it'd be too cluttered. Maybe the solution is something like free-map.org.uk's approach to photographs, by overlaying little triangle roadsigns near each restriction, and two boxes wherein you can type the weight and height of your vehicle such that it shows only relevant restrictions.

(i wonder if there is a expected national maximum vehicle height - ie the limit of how tall bridges have to be before they're not signed as a lowbridge?)

the DfT have sent me a spreadsheet containing detailed data about the Primary Route Network (these are the roads which are green-signed and which we mark as highway=trunk in the UK). I've done spot checks on the spreadsheet and it seems to be an ideal level of detail for cross-checking to make sure we have the Network right. Interesting, many motorways are listed. I wonder if any small stretches of motorways aren't...

I haven't yet, though, used it to alter anything in OSM, as I'm not sure if this would be ok copyrightwise. I don't intend to copy it systemically out, but to use it discover errors and missing bits in our database. So I've written back asking for specific permission to do this.

I also asked if there was a centralised list of classified roads. Apparently there is not - this is handled by the Government Office Regions in England (and I guess by the Scottish and Welsh Governments). Maybe this explains the duplicate A594s!