Colchester
V・T・E Colchester, Colchester(Essex District)  |
| latitude: 51.88787, longitude: 0.90056 |
| Browse map of Colchester 51°53′16.33″ N, 0°54′02.02″ E |
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Colchester is a town in Colchester(Essex District) at latitude 51°53′16.33″ North, longitude 0°54′02.02″ East.
Improving the Map
Housenumbers
Map of Housenumbers in Colchester
The brown indicates buildings with housenumbers. Black indicates nodes with housenumbers. Pink indicates housenumbers that do not have an addr:street=* tag. You should add street tags to those housenumbers. (NOTE: many of the housenumbers without addr:street tags use an old way of linking streets with houses known as the Associatedstreet relation).
Like most of England, address data is missing mostly, except for lots of East Colchester, which was surveyed by Edloach.
Local shops in many areas (except Highwoods) are also probably missing.
How to map housenumbers
The most efficient way is to use Keypad Mapper 3. It is an app with a keypad, which lets you enter house-numbers as you walk around some streets. This will create address nodes, which you can open up in JOSM. You then move these address nodes over their respective houses, and add this data to OSM. If you like, you can also draw buildings, and merge the address nodes with buildings (Ctrl+Shift+J). However, drawing buildings is extremely time consuming, even with the BuildingTools plugin.
There are a few disadvantages to this approach. It requires knowledge of JOSM, which is an advanced editor. KeyPad Mapper 3 is an old piece of software that has not been updated in years, and there are chances the software could stop working. As well as this, Keypad Mapper is only available on Android.
Another approach is to draw the buildings first, and add the street tags to them. This way, Streetcomplete will ask for the house-numbers of the buildings while you are surveying. Make sure you mark the buildings as building=house (or any building tag that is not building=yes) otherwise the housenumber tasks will not show up on Streetcomplete.
To know whether a building contains multiple houses, look for fences in the backyard. A fence indicates where the house ends and the next house starts. Make sure to add the street that the building is present in, otherwise the next step won't work. If you are unsure, leave it empty, you can add a note while surveying.
Once you have drawn buildings, in streetcomplete, you can zoom into the area where you drew buildings, and "scan for quests here" (can be found by clicking on the button with three bars in the top right). A ton of quests asking for the house-numbers of the houses you drew will show up. You can go surveying by walking through those streets and marking the housenumbers in StreetComplete.
If you didn't mark the street of a building, a quest won't show up when you go surveying. When you walk past a house, and realise which street it is on, make an OSM note (longpress -> Create new note) recording the housenumber and street of a house.
Shops
Local shops are probably missing too. To map local shops, you can make a note on an app such as Streetcomplete or osmand outlining the information of the shop.
Conversly, you can take a geo-located photo of the shop. Keypadmapper and OSMand let you do this. Streetcomplete lets you include photos in OSM notes you make.
If you are using streetcomplete, you can simply name the shop, and include a photo that shows additional details.
The problem with taking photos is that it make look intrusive to people who are passing by, or to people within the shop.
Surveying
Surveying for these two things (addresses & shops) is a good way to improve the map. Addresses can be surveyed using a software like Keypad mapper 3, or using field papers. Shops can be surveyed by taking geo-located photos/audio.
NOTE: These issues (addressses & local shops) is basically a problem everywhere in the UK, including most parts of London. The easiest way to fix the addressing issue is to persuade the government to release address data freely. Shops will have to be mapped manually, however.
Bus Information
These four (important) pieces of information are missing from all bus routes in Colchester:
- Total duration of bus journey (Key:duration)
- Frequency of each bus (Key:interval)
- Conditional frequency of each bus (interval:conditional)
- Time of day the bus runs (Key:opening_hours)
Not many public transport routing software use these tags, but they may start doing so, in which case these tags would be very useful (for example, you can know whether a bus comes every hour or every 10 minutes).
All this information (duration, interval, opening_hours) can be found on the bustimes.org website.
To map opening hours, list the time that the first bus leaves the first stop to the time the last bus arrives at the last stop.
All the bus routes have been mapped , however, which is good to see. It seems that Edloach has mapped them.