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!

should be sorted now :)

I've also in the last couple of days added rendering for highway=pedestrian,area=yes (so plazas work); railway=abandoned,bridge=yes.

i'm going for canal locks next (that is ways with lock=yes, rather than the waterway=lock_gate proposal which is rather hard to implement). i know that the little arrows point against the flow, but should the way generally point downstream or upstream?

Higgy - t@h will render your in-construction roads if you set highway=construction, then construction to whatever you'd set highway to (unclassified, primary, trunk, etc). They will come out as a dashed version of the normal rendering.

Did quite a bit of mapping in the Leicester's West End today - got more detail on the River Soar and the canal, including the Northbridge Lock and a couple of weirs, national cycle network route 63 northwest as far as Fosse Road North (here it follows a disused railway - the Leicester & Swannington - which the internets reliably inform me was the first proper railway south of the River Trent), and southeast into De Montfort University. Also did some residential stuff in the Narborough Road/Western Road area, and random roads around All Saints.

Did Castle Gardens footways. Disappointed that the gate to access the steps to the top of the castle mound was locked. Also, footbridge over St Nicholas Circle, locked (has been for some time it seems).

more work on Evington yesterday&today. Evington Park and Shady Lane Arboretum now have some internal features and more accurate boundaries. i found a public footpath going from the Arboretum into the golf course, need to go back and do that at some point. all residential roads east of the parks and south of Whitehall Road/Spencefield Lane done now. also, some footpath detail in Scraptoft/Thurnby/Bushby.

mjd - you appear to be under a misapprehension about highway=trunk/primary. When you say

I always thought "trunk roads" connected major areas of industry/commerce/population.

Indeed. More formally, this network connecting major areas of industry/commerce/population is called the Primary Route Network, and is signed in green on the ground. The roads are of no particular quality, so you get some dual carriageways, some roads built to motorway standards, but also some pretty bad roads which nontheless are the best road linking their major areas.

I can't comment on whether the roads in your area form part of the Primary Route Network as I've not been there. But if they have green signs, they should be highway=trunk; if they have white signs, they should be highway=primary. It's quite possible, however, they have white signs, in which case this alteration was wrong.

In the UK you might be tempted to interpret 'trunk' differently, meaning a centrally-maintained road (as you seem to be by saying the government is removing them). This would be wrong for our purposes. Having Highways Agency-maintained roads showing as green and county council-maintained-roads will be useless for navigation - as roads are officially 'detrunked' they are not downgraded in quality; having the colour depend upon the organisation paying the bills for maintenance is not going to be terribly useful.

I'm unsatisfied with the use of two differing interpretations of what highway=trunk/primary means in the United Kingdom on the map. Tagging the Primary Route Network is consistent with other mapping providers, easily shows the routes recommended by the government for getting between major destinations. Tagging the roads funded by the Highways Agency is of no use to anyone that I can tell. Can we all agree on this please?

This morning I got an email from the DfT asking me when I need the list of primary routes by. This is promising.

Went out mapping this morning, trying to pin down NCN route 6 in Leicester. This comes to the city centre from Aylestone by the Great Central Way : a former railway turned into a rather pleasant cycle and pedestrian route; then via a bizarre series of diversions it gets to the canal towpath, diverts from the canal towpath, then back again, eventually heading towards Birstall. Not quite sure what was going on in their minds - there's a much easier route to my mind. Anyway.

While I was in the area, I mapped the new, temporary, path of Upperton Road, opened just a few days ago. Apparently I got there a day too early, though, as part of the Great Central Way was closed off and does not open until tomorrow...

I am seeking a definitive list of roads which make up the Primary Route Network, and also a definitive list of Primary Destinations. SI 1994/1519 says that a primary route is one which is designated so by the Secretary of State. Therefore I assume the Department holds such a list? If so, I would like to know whether this list is available directly to the general public, and further, whether the government asserts any crown copyright in the use of the list for cartographic purposes by third parties.

Further to this, I wonder the same thing about the entire list of classified roads - A roads and B roads both - is such a list centrally maintained and if so, would the government assert copyright or database right in the list?

Finally, I would like to know if there is any method by which interested parties can be notified of any changes to these lists...

Traced the entirety of the England/Scotland border from NPE this evening (and uploaded it). This hasn't changed one bit, as far as I know, since the 1950s - and indeed much later than that - and the path rarely intersects with already-existing stuff, so the traced accuracy should be reasonably good.

Branching off it, I have a bit of the Cumbria/Northumberland border, but couldn't find the Scottish Borders/Dumfries and Galloway border (well, on NPE it would be the Roxburghshire/Dumfriesshire border).

We were discussing on IRC earlier about how, now that we have borders coming into the database, to render different types of borders at different lowzooms and different weights. If we do this by keyword, (parishnumber defined by Map_features, so my England/Scotland border would have border_weight=1, whilst border_weight would also be used for the borders between US states and German Länder; border_weight=10 would be used for English parishes and French communes? Perhaps there is a more elegant solution, but if so I'm not seeing it. (could relations help?)

In Leicester this weekend. Finished the Leicester suburban villages of Scraptoft, Thurnby, and Bushby, and did some more of Evington. Found all sorts of twiddly bits in Thurnby that we didn't know existed. Annoyingly 2036,1341 seems to be stuck in queue, although 2035,1341 - with far more stuff on it - has updated fine.

Also did a footpath, that I remember from my childhood, over fields between Evington and Thurnby. I always wondered where exactly it went. Well, I know now. Quite a short walk, and my lift had arrived at the other end only barely before I arrived (having gone the long way round).

Tagged various random county boundaries as well - Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire/South Yorkshire variously. This is traced from the NPE. Have been careful around Sheffield, since this has changed since the 1950s there - probably needs someone to survey this on the ground if possible. There is a variance around Finningley, also. Eventual aim with these boundaries is to allow the namefinder to know about them, so "pubs in Rutland" will do what you expect (without needing is_in tags filled in).

Finished circumnavigating the City of Westminster on Sunday, meaning that 7 of 33 London boroughs have boundaries completed. With the upgrade to osmarender5, these now show up as dashed red lines in the tiles@home layer - a little odd when they are over highway=primary, but that doesn't happen too often.

Another thing that arises from osmarender5 is that tube stations are now rendered as halts. This is a good thing, I think, as the map was terribly cluttered - it does mean that every mainline station is now more prominent than every tube station. I think I'll be going over London systematically and downgrading minor stations to railway=halt - leaving as =station ones which are terminuses, which fast or semi-fast trains call at, or provide connections between lines or with the tube.

At the weekend I was in Leicester, and did Saffron Lane, and a few of the roads linking Wigston, Countesthorpe, Blaby and Cosby.

I finished the Camden polygon yesterday. The border within Regent's Park is not quite right, as I couldn't find anything on the ground to indicate the path it followed... Westminster next!

I need to obtain a bicycle for mapping with. Does anyone have suggestions? I don't want to spend all my time fiddling with it, so want something that is reliable and low-maintenance.

Starting from Cricklewood, I managed to get a reasonable attempt at the Barnet/Camden border. The border here is quite different to other sections of border I've mapped, in that it rarely, if ever, seems to follow roads, instead apparently preferring to follow the line dividing people's back gardens. Tomorrow I'll go for a walk around Maida Vale, and should be able to finish off the Camden polygon.

Using the nifty new Zappy service, I discovered that someone had already added borders representing Kent to the database. As these were traced from the NPE map, however, this includes the old County of London/Kent border rather than the post-1965 Greater London/Kent boundary. The old County of London/Kent border is now the Greenwich/Bexley and Lewisham/Bromley border, so this is still pretty useful.

Set out yesterday lunchtime with the intent of finishing off the London Borough of Camden. Instead, I got lost somewhere north of Hampstead Heath, so I only got the Camden/Haringey border finished, and not the borders with Barnet , Brent and Westminster. I think I'll attack the border from the other direction for my next attempt : I know that the A5 Edgware Road is the western border, so I can start from there.

London Borough of Islington done now. I may go and revisit the Crouch End area again at some point because I wasn't 100% satisfied with my survey there, but it's good enough.

As if to make up for this complexity, the border after this was easy: Hornsey Lane/Dartmouth Park Road/Brecknock Road/York Way, from Hornsey to King's Cross without really needing to turn.

So, that's 5 out of 33 boroughs!

thanks to a brief bit of walking this lunchtime, there are now complete and mostly accurate bounding boxes in the database for the City of London (boundary=administrative, left:district or right:district=City of London) and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (district=Tower Hamlets).

Westminster next, I expect.

I've done more boundary walking this week. We now have the boundary of the City of London with the London Boroughs of Westminster, Camden and Islington, as well as the (tiny) border with Hackney that I did at the weekend, leaving only the border with Tower Hamlets left to do, and also the Westminster/Camden border as far as the Euston Road.

I've started to acquire and tag administrative borders. In addition to the complete polygon for Rutland in the DB, which was already there, there is now a complete polygon for Leicestershire (traced from NPE), and also one for the London Borough of Hackney. Tower Hamlets isn't far off, either.

For the London Borough of Hackney, I actually went out onto the streets, starting at Finsbury Park, where I know it touches Islington and Haringey, and walked the entire border, without reference to existing maps, merely by looking at street signs and dustbins and parking meters. It should be pretty accurate, except in a few places where the situation on the ground was confusing. Maybe I could do a follow-up expedition, knocking on people's doors and asking them who they pay their council tax to.

Most of the Inner London borough boundaries should be possible to get this way. In less urban areas, we'll have to rely a lot more on inferences though.

I've not tagged these as areas, but as stretches of boundarie, with the tag boundary=administrative, and then left:district, right:district, left:county, right:county as appropriate. You can fetch out the entire polygon for Hackney by looking for all the segments with left:district=Hackney or right:district=Hackney.

Today we did a good portion (60 miles of tracks, according to the odometer) of the suburban countryside to the south-east of Leicester. Houghton on the Hill, Great Glen, Kibworth, and Billesdon, where we discovered a fete.

Plan for tomorrow is to head round outer Leicester in a curious kind of ring, trying to get more important through-roads (Beaumont Leys Lane, Fosse Road South, and the like) to the west of the city.