I'm sure someone warned you that osm is addictive ;-)

I have been adding various bus routes in London. I will add them even if I don't have the full route or all the bus stops because I, or someone else can come back to them at a later date to update them. I add all the roads and bus stops to the relation.

You can download the trace points for a bounding box in JOSM or Merkaartor. You can also see the traces for an area in Potlatch (the online editor).

You just missed the deadline of the main map update. It is currently in the process of being updated, so should be viewable in the next few days, depending on where in the render queue it is. It takes nearly a week to re-render everywhere in the world that has ever been viewed. The process starts on a Wednesday afternoon.
osm.wiki/FAQ#I_have_just_made_some_changes_to_the_map._How_do_I_get_to_see_my_changes.3F

This is awesome work. This an excellent example of great usage of osm data. If they are signed routes, are you putting them into osm as relations?

This is awesome.

JennyH: Unfortunately no one else said that they were intending on going, otherwise we would have waited, or phoned/texted you to let you know that we had moved.

Marlow: You are probably in the button 3 routing screen rather than the raster map display which is button 6. I currently have a private beta version that uses vector data downloaded online, though it does cache the map data locally (with a refetch after 7 days).

Bus routes should be added as a route relation linking the bus stops that it stops at with the roads the bus drives along.

Just awesome the way that you wrote that. :-D

From http://www.sustrans.com/webfiles/general/sustrans_2008_ncn_map.pdf it looks like they have developed it into a coastal route to Berwick from Edinburgh finally.

I'm the one who done the rcn43 between Edinburgh and Glasgow; ncn75 between Edinburgh and Glasgow; ncn76 between Edinburgh and Stirling on the South of the Forth; and the ncn1 between Berwick and Edinburgh.

What I do for the long trips to get the route is that I don't care about the detail, and just care about where I went. I then let the locals come in and fill the gaps. By going out to do an area several times, I pick a small bit more each time I go, thus slowly gets more detailed, though the full route is added in one go. I didn't think the ncn76 went any further east than South Queensferry on the south side of the Forth.

I'm now living in London.

You can have a relation containing relations. The only international cycle route that I know of off the top of my head, is the one that runs up the east coast of the UK, then acrross the north sea to Scandanavia, then down the west coast of mainland Europe. Think it's called the north sea cycle route.

One of the things that you can do with multiple people is to each go down a different path in the park, and then join back up again further down the park. Having multiple traces is useful if there is some error in one of them, or one of the GPS stops working. It's not the first time in the 1.5 years I've been involved in the project that I've lost some mapping data.

Having almost identical tracks shows that the GPSs are all giving the same location. I have heard of some extreme mappers who always use 2+ GPS when mapping, as they don't trust taking just one.

An alternative method of checking the data in the database is to use the data layer. You zoom into the map, and then click the white + on the blue background at the top right of the map on openstreetmap.org. You can then see the data in the database overlaid on the map, and can click it to get more information.

Alternatively drop me a message with a link to the osm/openstreetmap category on your blog, and I'll get it added to http://blogs.openstreetmap.org/

With changesets in the upcoming 0.6 API, there will be changesets, where users can put a comment in of what they have done.

I use a bus stop node at the side of the way that the bus stop is on that way there isn't a problem with which side of the road the bus stop is on. There is currently no way to deal with loops in bus routes.

1) How far will you/ have you travelled to attend a mapping party?
The longest trips so far are: Edinburgh to London on a coach overnight, and London to Dublin rail and sail, with the bike.
Generally it is just across London, or sometimes to the other side of the UK

2) Do you feel OSM mapping parties form an important part of your social life?
Yep

3) Are you primarily concerned with the mapped progress of your local (home) area, or with the success of the OSM project in general?
Of course I want the area that I live to be properly mapped, and want osm to succeed.

ricosi64: If there are no mapping parties in your part of the world, why don't you start running one?

Do you have the latest version of JOSM?

The alternative would be to look at the data layer, by clicking the plus on the top right of the openstreetmap home page, and then checking the data layer.