Trying to connect to OSM Route Manager. It seems to be down, with just a dribble of data coming in - one packet every 10s. Is it down, or is it supposed to be like this.

Thank you, xeen, for the information on using relations for bus routes. I just wish that all this stuff was in one place.

It appears that I have to do each variant of a bus route as a separate relation. This seems very cumbersome: one of the routes here has six different opt-outs (same spine of route, but serves different roads/villages/estates at different times of the day) and all of them are possible. Each trip seems to be different; am I really expected to create 64 separate relations (albeit grouped together under route_master) ?

Am I supposed to create a separate relation for a route whose “opposite direction” is a simple reversal of the “forward direction” ? What if the “reverse” route differs only by the path it takes round a roundabout ?

Got bored with doing postboxen now. I’m as confused as h**l about FMR’s ever-changing bus routes, and their strange geometry. I’ve started to do the 43 route from Malvern to Upton s/ Severn, but I can’t get the hang of relations. Specifically, how do I get a relation marked as “incomplete” (or does this mean “incompletely downloaded”?)? How to do spurs/loops ? How to accommodate a one-way loop where both directions of a route appear to go in the same direction ? How to accommodate the situation where a route serves the same roads/stops in the same direction on the same trip ? (There’s one bus route here which serves one stop, dives into a housing estate, and emerges and serves the same stop again; sometimes the drivers go round and round this loop all day, until they reach escape velocity.)

Been trying to get some postboxes marked as gone/stolen/absent, as a result of OSMing and finding that they're not there any more. Haven't got a response out of he who maintains the dracos data.

Anybody any idea why JOSM has chosen to show this residential road in dotted lines ? Nothing special about it, except that someone has seen fit to fill in a load of pointless parameters (tunnel=0, layer=0, bridge=0 etc)

How does on denote a walkway between (in this case) two fields ? KeepRight is complaining that the way is not connected to the rest of the map.

I could do a pseudo-footway to connect it to nearby footways, but what's the point ? You can generally walk any way you like across such a field, so marking out a specific footway is a bit silly.

I seem to keep coming across naptan-source bus stops which are in the middle of buildings or otherwise in silly places.
What's the procedure for moving a bus stop, assuming I have an accurate position for such ?
I assume I can't just move it manually, because it would get overwritten with the next naptan import.

What is it with these people who glue landuse=residential to a convenient road, and then butt another landuse=residential alongside it, also glued, so that you get three ways sharing the long sequence of nodes ?

If you have two adjoining landuses the same, then you just make it one big area, the union of the two small ones, right ?

If the road in question is not residential, is it supposed to have lu=r areas on either side of it (the interpretation that I've chosen in this particular unpicking) or does the road simply go "through" a big lu=r ?

There are a few no-entry signs around here, which have no corresponding one-way sign at the other end. People around here swear blind that this means that the whole section of road "beyond" the no-entry (to where ?) is one-way.

I don't think this is correct, and have asked on FixMyStreet for clarification.

I would have thought that this meant that both sections were two-way, but that you simply could not cross in the prohibbed direction from one to the other.

Is this right, that it's merely a zero-length plug ? How would you represent this on OSM ?

I tend to be the sort of persun who works with nodes rather than ways. Does anyone know if there're any tools out there to create "nodes" based on JPEG/EXIF files ? I know I can do this with a load of photographs and a GPX trace, but I want to do it without the GPX trace, just relying on the GPS data within the images.

Just spent a pointless rainy day in Castlemorton, looking for the elusive WR13 139 Bowling Green. Nowhere to be seen. A lot of boxen have been nicked around here, but I could see no sign of straps being boltcuttered from telegraph poles or the like.

The given postcode seems far too close to the Chandler's Cross box.

I seem to be getting one non-existent box in each area that I do. Not just "removed", but "never was there". Are RM really putting fake boxes in just to detect people copying the lists ? Are other people finding this ?

Oh, and don't get me going about the glue-sniffers, people who glue ways together so that a highway and (e.g.) a common's boundary are coincident. Do these people not realise that roads have a finite non-zero width and things (street furniture) need to sit between the common boundary and the road's edge ?

MWBG

Around the area that I am surveying, a lot of roads seem to have been entered as tracks. These show up as dashed lines on the slippy map and make it very difficult to see that there is a through road in certain places. Other mapping providers don't do this. What's the difference between a track and a road ? For an example, try the coordinates in this diary entry.

Sorry, clicking on the diary entry doesn't point to any specific coordinates. They are: 52.0436051,-2.3317704

MWBG

Just had an interesting "oi, what you doing?" moment in WR9. With laptop, clipboard and smartphone, I was happily updating my notes on newly found postboxes when I was approached by a chap who'd been cutting the grass at a nearby hostelry with an ArnoldJ.
"I'm surveying postboxes; RM don\'t know where they all are !", say I.
"Oh, I didn't know that one was still working.", quoth he and off-toddled.
Must've thought I was an inspector for the DWP.

Still it's better than walking around parks with a cameraphone. Someone once set I should get a HVV so as to render myself invisible.

Does anyone know what's hap with dracos ? Stuff I put on OSM nearly a month ago still hasn't made it to Matthew's www site.

Can't understand why the Bing Maps Imagery only zooms so far. At a certain limit, it says "increase zoom level to see more detail". Who is showing this message: JOSM or Bing ? Doing a right-click increase-zoom-level does nothing. When I go to the real Bing Maps website, I can get two more levels of zoom; this is a real pig when trying to check the exact position of small objects, especially as Bing Maps has no usuable "export the coordinates under the mouse cursor" facility (The center-map-here-and-start-to-email-it fiddle doesn't work because the pushpins get misaligned on my netbook).

I was just wondering what the situation with the directionality of signs was.
I've come across a few nodes on roads which are tagged as maxspeed=

Quite apart from the fact that JOSM renders all these as "60", how can a "node" represent a maximum speed ? Surely, you want to know what speed it is in "that" direction and what speed it is in "this" direction.

If you can see the "whole" village, it is obvious which side is NSL and which 30 or whatever.

Is there any convention on which way a sign is facing, and how to have different "text" for each direction, especially when the node is on a way (which has an obvious direction), something like forward:maxspeed=50mph | backward:maxspeed=30mph.

I question the usage of maxspeed tags on nodes anyway, exept as a temporary measure. Surely it is redundant once the ways leading from that node have all been maxspeeded.

How do you represent multiple signs on a signpost, all pointing in different directions ?

How do you do signs indicating "this is the start of such-and-such a village" ? Again, my prefs would be to put them in as a temporary measure and then, when you've got the full set, join them up to make a bounding polygon.

There's a road near here (Hampden Road) with the usual Evel Knievel sign at its start (it's a cul-de-sac). The sign is qualified with the equally usual "Except for Access".

It is shewn in OSM as access=destination; bicycle=yes; highway=residential

Where does access=destination come from ? Is it a made-up value ? (Not that there's anything wrong in that)

Thing is, access=private, access=permissive and so forth, refer to all classes of traffic whereas, here, it seems to refer just to motor traffic. Which is correct

I would have put the "destination" bit as motorcar=destination | motorcycle=destination and left everything else as defaults (access=public being assumed)

There seems to be an awful lot of postboxen getting nicked and/or blown up here in WR14. Before I started postbox orienteering, I was of the impression that the set of postboxen was pretty much fixed and that the only problem was of getting some sense out of the RM FOI list.

Now, it seems that the set of postboxen needs to be updated almost in real-time; no wonder RM don't want to release the list to the public: they'd never keep it uptodate.

Anyway, managed to speak to Collections Manager at Malvern Rose Bank Gardens PDO today. Seemed quite a nice chap. He told me that the ones that'd been nicked didn't need to be replaced because there were alternatives < 1 mile away (which is true) but that some of the nicked ones _are_ going to get replaced, even though the little lamp boxes only take about 3 items a day !

These lamp boxes cost £1000 a time, it appears.

Just wish they would secure them a bit more sensibly, like embedding them in a wall; all the nicked ones were just "secured" with boltcutterable wire straps to a tree/post.

Now I see WR8 75 has got blown up again. Can't they lock them at night, like meter boxes ?

Just GPSed a postbox in Kempsey, whilst on bus which was waiting time. As it happened, this postbox had already been put on OSM.

However, I idly looked at it on GSV and it wasn't there !
I move one frame South and one frame North and it is there in both !

Is google deliberately altering (not just obscuring) images to prevent people violating copyright ?

I've come across this disappearing box phenomenon before (before I'd heard of OSM) but I can't remember where it was.

I know RM moves and removes boxen every once in a while, but even they can't remove a box and leave no trace in the few seconds that the google car takes to pass.

Somebody look at this location and tell me I'm not going mad. (I'm mad enough already, so much so that whilst in one particular institution, I took it upon myself to reprog the phone system to play "They're coming to take me away.." on MoH.)

Just noticed that RM have got round to putting collection plates on some of the plateless boxen around here.

On saturday, the postman had just stuck it on using sticky tape, for a local resident to drill holes in and fix it properly !

Maybe they should fix WR14 69, which claims that the last post on a Saturday is 1:30 _A_ M !

Then I got home and found that the Salvation Army Revenue Protection Officers were waiting for me.

I've noticed a few places around here where "neighborhoods" are denoted using the same style of street name sign as ordinary street names.

One such example is "Pin's Green". Another is "Lower Interfields".

These are inevitably a small collection of houses (just houses, no other facilities, so I suppose that makes it a hameau) alongside a fairly major A road.

In the cases above, the roads are Worcester Road and Leigh Sinton Road respectively.

What to do in these circs ? Does the "main" name of the road get suspended for as long as the aforementioned name is present ? Is the "main" name of the road supposed to have "died out" by now, so that its official name is up for grabs ?

How does the house numbering work.

It wouldn't be so bad if there were a distinct service road but, in the case of Pin's Green, it's just a layby/bus stop.