Thursday 2 August 2012

Keeping stuff up-to-date

It is all very well mapping an area, but things keep changing. A new £90 million hospital has just opened on the outskirts of Beverley and so as we passed it today we dropped in to grab a look around. Well, a look at just the grounds - I've had enough of the inside of hospitals. It was a bit unusual in two ways. Firstly there was a lot of car parking, so much so that there were many empty parking places. At the other local hospitals parking is a nightmare. The second thing was completely unexpected to me: an electric vehicle charging point. The two bays were labelled as Hybrid Vehicle Charging, but surely a hybrid doesn't need charging as much as a totally electric vehicle. A hybrid, by definition, has more than one means of power, whereas an electric vehicle needs to charge or stops.

I was able to trace the outline of the new building from the latest Bing imagery, which are very helpful, well aligned and now less than a year old - the previous ones were up to eleven years old. Nearby we spotted a new allotment site and a short detour helped add that to the map too. It is not a council site but a private one. It looks a good site. It was still a field on the new imagery, so it is pretty new.

As we drove through Beverley I noticed a lot of the residential streets have new 20 mph speed limits, so they all need surveying and updating. Speed limits don't take long to survey, so an hour wandering around should do it.

I rather enjoy looking for these changes and adding them to the map. I'm sure OSM is the only map to have both the hospital and the allotments on it right now - in fact how many other maps have allotments at all?

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