"elyob" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:
[email protected]...
> Hi, I'm ready to share my project with London-ese cyclists, to see
whether
> it's just worth the many man hours I've already spent.
>
> Anyone in Greater or Central London, also a keen cyclist, and keen
geo/map
> type person ... please contact me. I promise it's a cool project. I
just
> reached my limit of how much I can do by myself.
>
> Nick
> (Surbiton based)
Maps do seem to hot at the moment, worldwide, and especially in
London.
www.cyclemaps.com has been around for years, and there are
the two rival bike journey planners, TfL's at
www.tfl.gov.uk and the
London Cycle Network one at
www.londoncyclenetwork.org.uk. And of
course there's the London Cycle Maps, now free, with their history
stretching back more than a quarter of a century, and their
connection with Cycle City Guides, and the adjoining cycle maps which
now cover all Surrey.
There's the Open Street Map project, whose centre of gravity seems to
be UCL. The book "Mapping Hacks", which came out in June, gives
things to do with maps and computers.
I bought myself a GPS for Christmas, and it's been proposed that the
Barnet branch of the London Cycling Campaign get itself a GPS (I'm
against that). It's very easy with Garmin's MapSource software to
load your GPS track into Google Earth. With the detail of the
photography inside the M25, the result is fantastic. It's like
following yourself in a helicopter, although if you descend below
about fifty feet above yourself, you do get a bit fuzzy.
If you don't like the Ordnance Survey's copyright rules, Autoroute is
becoming quite useful as a map on which you can draw things. It's
Bill Gates, of all people, who has liberal copyright rules.
With a scanner, you can use any map as a base map. I have taken to
using a Philips Navigator road atlas, with elevation data from the
radar mission by the space shuttle Endeavour (the paid version of
'Map Maker' can do that) With the proper choice of layer tints, that
produces a pseudo Bart's map, but up-to-date, and with your own track
added, either from GPS, or just as a drawn layer.
So, I would be interested in hearing about anyone's cool projects,
but I'm having enough fun with my own projects to want to take over
anyone else's.
Jeremy Parker
