OpenStreetMap

Akranes mapping results

Posted by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on 15 December 2008 in English. Last updated on 31 December 2008.

I wrote about my plans to map Akranes, a practically unmapped town of around 7,000 people in my last diary entry. Things went better than planned and I arrived at around 16:00 on Saturday after managing to hitch a ride from Reykjavík; Arriving almost 1h30m earlier than I would have if I had taken the bus.

I proceeded to map until around 23:00, then I slept until 6:00 in -6C in what I later discovered was an abandoned backyard (I thought it belonged to a friend at the time, but he had apparently moved). Then I mapped some more from around 7:00 to 15:00 and then took the bus back to Reykjavík.

I've uploaded the traces I made (JOSM screenshot of them). All in all I cycled around 83 km over 8 hours (6 hours moving time) at a moving average of 12.3 km/h.

I've added most of the data I surveyed to OSM, although I still have to add some nodes based on photographs I took and some areas need further landuse tagging. The area is far from complete though. It needs footways, amenities, the outlying road network etc etc.

Update: I party-rendered the weekend.

Location: Miðbær, Akraneskaupstaður, Western Region, 300, Iceland

Discussion

Comment from seav on 16 December 2008 at 04:19

Wow! I admire your dedication to continue mapping even as winter sets in. :-)

Comment from nm7s9 on 16 December 2008 at 11:05

Looks good!

BTW - how should we tag roads that habitually become impassable at certain times of the year.

Do we tag as no access from (for example) December to March or do we wait for
snow to make it impassable and then tag it as such until the condition disappears. (I favour the latter for major access roads).

Comment from Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on 16 December 2008 at 13:20

There's no agreed-upon tagging schema for tagging seasonal roads. You could invent something like `impassable_from=Dec-Mars` but then you'd have to get applications to support that, and some data formats OSM is exported to might not even be capable of it.

You could do what you suggest and remember to change the road at a given time each year to have `access=no` but ultimately that's in inadequate solution. You can't expect that users will download data in the time frame they expect to use it, and even if they do download it from Dec-Mars they'll have no idea from looking at the data when the road will become passable again.

There was a discussion on the osm-talk mailing list about this recently if I recall correctly. Perhaps you want to track down some other people interested in this and see if you can come up with a solution?

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