If you could have your dream GPS cycling map...

[andygates]

...what would it have on it? 

And what would it not have?  I'm looking at playing with the OSM render engine and need ideas

To break it down a little, think about how you'd like to see;

* Land (and water) - contour lines? terrain shading?
* Roads - de-emphasize trunk routes? de-emphasize residential roads?
* Offroad routes - graded? gates and stiles highlighted?
* Public transport - bus and rail stations, presumably...
* Points of Interest (POI).  There are lots of POI, and I'm guessing that the OSM-Audax burn of the map might not need to include, say, letter boxes, bus stops or car service stations, but would want to include cake shops and bike shops, pharmacies.  Historical places?  Viewpoints?

[Wascally Weasel]

If we are talking dream mapping I would like to be able to select and de-select features at will – I don’t need the map cluttered up with POIs, shops etc all the time but I would like to know where they are when I need them.

The Active 10 (just bought recently) has a neat feature where the map turns as you do (well sort of) – ideally the place names would adapt rather than being upside down.

[Richard Fairhurst]

For me, the next big challenge for all OSM-based cycle mapping - whether on Garmins, as web maps, as printed maps, or as routing - is indicating the "cycleability" of a particular road.

I know, for example, that of the five B-roads out of Charlbury, there are two I'm reasonably happy to cycle along, one I'd rather avoid but which is ok, and two I'd avoid if at all possible. But they're all tagged the same. How do you indicate this sort of thing without requiring really laborious tagging (e.g. number of vehicles per hour) or subjectivity (e.g. "cycleability=bad")?

Outside of OSM, the Cheltenham guys have proposed a five-stage ranking scheme (http://www.cyclenation.org.uk/resources/mapping.php). It's interesting, certainly, and the most comprehensive attempt to tackle it so far. But there's two main problems with it in my view. Firstly, it's designed more for urban roads, and so doesn't work so well in the countryside where "suitability" isn't just one-dimensional (you might be happy with hills but dislike heavy traffic, for example). Secondly, it confuses cartography with data - defining everything by reference to five colours might work for some full-colour printed maps, but not much else.

On a related topic, the OSM-derived mapping at http://maps.cloudmade.com/ has routing now, including a 'bicycle' option. Still a work in progress but lots of fun to play with.

[gonzo]

Road quality and size - I don't want to use a busy road if there's limited room for overtaking cars.

[clarion]

Roads, contours, paths & bridleways, terrain, buildings, POIs, campsites etc.  Basically what's on an OS...

Oh - and it wouldn't use batteries, and I could fold it & keep it in my barbag

[David Martin]

Roads, contours, paths & bridleways, terrain, buildings, POIs, campsites etc.  Basically what's on an OS...

Oh - and it wouldn't use batteries, and I could fold it & keep it in my barbag

Steps and barriers on cyclepaths. Track conditions. That sort of thing would be good.

..d

[FatBloke]

OS Explorer maps with the ability to zoom in.

All footpaths, cyclepaths, bridleways etc marked. Also marked as to whether a right of way or not.

All pubs marked 

[delthebike]

+1 to FatBlokes suggestion but 1:1 scale. 

[Wowbagger]

My understanding that the lack of detail on Garmin maps is down to memory on the machine itself.

TimO uses a device which has OS Landranger quality maps. I think it must have lots more memory.

I'd like contours and I understand there's a way of getting them but I've no idea how.

[FatBloke]

+1 to FatBlokes suggestion but 1:1 scale. 

Could be a tad problemmatical with only a 2.2" screen Del!   

[delthebike]

+1 to FatBlokes suggestion but 1:1 scale. 

Could be a tad problemmatical with only a 2.2" screen Del!   

Good point!  I'll have a paper version then, as well, in my handy Pantecnicon Fleet.   

[Greenbank]

I rely on 3 things, in order:-

a) Route plotted on bikely and uploaded to my non-mapping GPS
b) My memory (which is pretty good especially when I've been looking at the maps whilst plotting the route for the GPS)
c) Pages ripped from a £5 1:250,000 road atlas

Haven't found a need for a GPS that does mapping yet.

[clarion]

The location & opening hours of all teashops & cafes (and whether they do all Day Breakfasts) are pretty important.

[LEE]

I'd like OS 50,000 Landranger please. (I can then make a fairly accurate guess which are then nice country lanes)


I'd like 3D fly-thru view option (as per most Digital Mapping s/w packages) so I can see terrain in 'real life'


(do I really want to see that coming?)

Maybe a variable viewing angle (3D hardware required?  hmmm, getting pricey).

I'll settle for what my Gamin satnav provides but with an OS map.


Note.  All this is possible now with a small GPS receiver and a small linked Laptop.

[frankly frankie]

My understanding that the lack of detail on Garmin maps is down to memory on the machine itself.

I think 'detail' is not the word I'd use.  OS 1:50000 maps are wonderfully information-rich.  They are not, however, as detailed as the Garmin maps.  Nor as accurate.
Also Garmin maps already provide what Wascally asked for - place names and road labels which adapt and stay right-way-up as the map rotates.

To address the original question, certainly off-road routes graded would be one holy grail.  And among POIs, petrol stations and small supermarkets of the 8 till 8 type are at least as interesting as cake shops.

[Rob S]

Adapting place names are going to obscure the detail you want unless they are going to also keep jumping around the screen finding a spare space.

Satmap's scrolling map is designed to make following a route easier and that's exactly what it does.

[RW]

I'd like OS 50,000 Landranger please. (I can then make a fairly accurate guess which are then nice country lanes)


I'd like 3D fly-thru view option (as per most Digital Mapping s/w packages) so I can see terrain in 'real life'


(do I really want to see that coming?)

Maybe a variable viewing angle (3D hardware required?  hmmm, getting pricey).

I'll settle for what my Gamin satnav provides but with an OS map.


Note.  All this is possible now with a small GPS receiver and a small linked Laptop.

But could you see any of that on a two inch screen?  I'm used to the spindly little lines that you get on mapsource, and that's about as much as my eyesight can cope with on a bike on the move.  I suppose it's different if you're doing your planning on the move as it were.

The one thing I'd want is the ability to turn any of it off!

[andrew_s]

What I'd like would be fully categorised Garmin-style vector data, together with control over which categories were displayed at which zoom levels, and independent control over the zoom ranges at which labels were displayed

Sort of like:

Class	On	Min	Max	labels	Min	Max
A road	On	0	20km	off	0	2km
B road	On	0	5km	off	0	800m
tertiary	On	0	3km	off	0	500m
unclassified	On	0	2km	off	0	300m
residential	On	0	1km	on	0	200m
50m contours	On	0	5km	off	0	1km
10m contours	Off	0	3km	off	0	500m
rivers	On	0	5km	off	0	500m
streams	Off	0	3km	off	0	500m
towns	Off	0	3km	on	2km	5km
villages	Off	0	3km	on	1km	2km
pubs	On	0	2km	off	0	500m
cafes	Off	0	2km	off	0	500m
supermarkets	Off	0	2km	off	0	500m

It would also be nice to pick symbols, line colours and thicknesses too.

You'd spend the first couple of weeks fiddling to get a setup you liked, and then just turn extras on (eg campsites) as you wanted them. With a decent set of defaults many people wouldn't need to fiddle at all.


Raster data like OS 1:50,000 looks nice, but it's only good when displayed close to the intended scale. If you want a different scale, you've got to store a complete separate set of data.
So UK 1:250,000 data in my MemoryMap folder is 138 MB
1:50,000 data is 25 times that at 3.1GB (coverage doesn't exactly match due to missing sea)
1:25,000 data is 4 times at 12GB
1:10,000 data is 6.25 times at 75GB  (looks like this)
1:2,500 data would be 16 times at 1.2TB (if it was available). (fully accurate at this stage)
You would need to go down to at least a 10,000 scale to compete with the accuracy of the Garmin vector data.
The really big drawback is that you can't turn different parts on and off separately, so you don't get the roads without also getting all the buildings and garden fences, you can't turn round the text etc.

[perpetual dan]

OS maps, but with the visual weight of the roads inverted as a start. Actually, I'd pay for proper paper maps like this at a sensible scale.
Then cycleability, maybe with my own overrides. This depends on direction for steeper slopes.
Then switchable feature sets, ie GIS. I rarely care about district boundaries.
Then pick features by importance without cluttering the screen .... ah that was an idea in my PhD, so maybe I should revisit that

For now, the zoom on the active 10 is good - most of the time I'm happy around 1:100k, but the detail is really nice to get now and then.

[andygates]

Okay, working through this wishlist...   

Selectable POI layers - outside the scope of my OSM skilz

Cycleability - there are surface quality tags, but they're not universally applied.  I can certainly try to render them.  They're mostly used for MTB trails, which IIRC have a blue-green-red-black scale of toughness.  Hmm.  Similarly there's a carriageway width, so one *could* write code to say "this is a trunk road and it's got sub-4m carriageways so it's narrow and busy = bad" -- but there would still be the assumption that the road is busy due to its category.

Gradient would be nice, wouldn't it? 

Teashops, caffs, filling stations, supermarkets: check. 

3D terrain-o-mat: That depends on your device.

Good label behaviour is device-dependent too.  Tweak your settings if it's not to your taste

Andrew - crikey, detail!  I'll have to see where the rules for each class are applied.  I think it's mostly in the device, though.

----

A typ-file editor will let us pick our own colour schemes and icons.  Since this involves messing around with pretty things without doing any hard work, I like it. 

Traditionally, one renders roads as solid lines with their colours matching their road-sign colours and their width representing their trunkiness; we can tweak either or use a dotted or other pattern for "nasty to ride" roads like dual carriageways and motorways.


Icons for "brown sign" attractions to be close to those signs? 

A slice of cake for a cafe?  Wheel for a bike shop?  Can of pop and a choccy bar for a cornershop?...

[andrew_s]

Selectable POI layers - outside the scope of my OSM skilz

Andrew - crikey, detail!  I'll have to see where the rules for each class are applied. 

If you have the POIs as separate gpx files, you can query them separately if you load the files onto a Garmin using POILoader. You end up with the file name as the category name.
see First 4 hours with my new Garmin GPSmap 60Csx GPS unit and City europe mapping - Cycle Chat

I'd have thought it ought to be possible to set as a one-off with the data. Garmin data has roads categorised into 2 or 3 categories, and they turn on/off at different zoomlevels on CN than they do on Topo, which implies to me that it's a property of the map data file rather than the GPS firmware. Finding out how is another matter entirely.
I think that being able to change things on the GPS out on the road is a dream though. There's nothing on the menu structure, and that will be the firmware.

[andygates]

Aye, the zoomlevel does appear to be in the map.  OSMComposer looks like it's the "do what Andy wants, real easy and quick" tool!

OSM Composer - OpenStreetMap

[frankly frankie]

Gradient would be nice, wouldn't it? 

Cols/summits, with spot heights.

Hmm (looks at a bit of the Alps) - I don't see any evidence of these being tagged at all.  Now there's a job for a wet weekend!

[andygates]

I think they're tagged on the NASA SSRTM tile set - for the UK at least.  But their idea of peaks is topological, not geographical.  There's a natural=peak tag for OSM which I'm planning on using to bag tors in spring.

[nicknack]

I'd like OS 50,000 Landranger please. (I can then make a fairly accurate guess which are then nice country lanes)


I'd like 3D fly-thru view option (as per most Digital Mapping s/w packages) so I can see terrain in 'real life'

Looking at the 3D picture above, I think I would have expected the contours to be horizontal. Or does the terrain mapping use a different set of data, which doesn't necessarily match?