England Cycling Data project
The England Cycling Data project aims to incorporate open data on cycling infrastructure released by the UK's Department for Transport into OpenStreetMap. This is available as a background layer in Potlatch2, which has a merging tool enabling this to be merged in by manual inspection.
The data includes cycle routes, surface types, widths of cycle lanes, presence of lighting, cycle parking, and so on. The CycleStreets routing engine (used for CycleStreets & various apps) takes these into account and hopefully others plus renderers will too.
The project is being coordinated by CycleStreets and Gravitystorm.
Merging into OpenStreetMap - data now available
The data is now all available (June 2012), so please do help out with your area!
* The merging tool is now available!
* Screencast showing the tool
* Discussion on talk-gb and later discussion
The merging process works as follows:
- Click 'Map style' > 'Wireframe' to make things much easier to work with.
- The background data is highlighted either orange (needs attention) or blue (already processed).
- Click a background feature to select it.
- Ctrl+click (or cmd+click on a Mac keyboard) the relevant OSM feature to see a side-by-side comparison of the tags.
You can now review the tags, copy whichever ones are relevant, and mark the background features as complete if there's no more information to reconcile.
Data viz maps
Here are some ITO maps that show the data in OSM. This data may have been imported using this tool or manually surveyed, especially for areas where there is no data:
- DfT cycle data simple
- Cycleway and footway widths
- Cycleway segregation
- Highway lighting
- Cycle parking dots Cycle parking heatmap
- Road surfaces
- Traffic Calming
Also a map created by Richard Mann: http://www.transportparadise.co.uk/dftcyclelanes/
A Taginfo instance showing the DfT cycle data: http://dft-cycle.taginfo.smsm1.net/
Links to the data, and main contact for each area (please add yourself!)
Background
The DfT commissioned survey work in various cities around the UK for their online journey planner. In 2011-12 they released the results of the surveys as Open Data, in a format based on Ordnance Survey ITN data - unsuitable for use with OSM. However, in addition, they have funded work to convert the survey data to be based on OSM geometries suitable for incorporation.
Rather than organising this along the lines of a Bulk Import, we are taking advantage of new technologies in Potlatch 2 and developing new features to allow volunteers to collaborate on inspecting and merging the information into OSM.
The kinds of things surveyed include cycle routes, surface types, widths of cycle lanes, presence of lighting, cycle parking, and so on.
In the UK wide areas of the cycling infrastructure have been mapped, often more recently than the data from the DfT. Also, with the development of Vector Background layers in Potlatch 2, there was an opportunity to create an improved process for dealing with external datasets.
Further background information is available in blogs and on the mailing lists.
- Initial announcement of the project
- Update on the progress of the tool
- Talk-gb thread on the project
License
The (original, unprocessed) data is released under the Open Government License: Official letter from the DfT
The data on the snapshot server has had additional transformations for the purposes of merging into OSM, namely being snapped against OpenStreetMap geometry and the Bing imagery for additional alignment.
The Software
A number of software components are used to make all this work:
- Potlatch 2 is used as the editor, and can load data from both OSM and the DfT data. Merging is done with new merging panels. The splash pages, vector configuration file and other resources are available on github
- Snapshot Server is used to serve the DfT data for each user, saving them from having to load the whole country at a time
- Some scripts are used for loading data in and out of the server. These use Osmosis to read/write between XML and Postgres.
Feedback
Feedback (to CycleStreets and Gravitystorm) is welcome, on the data and its accuracy, the merging tool, or documentation.