Last week I was watching a(nother) emergency-services documentary, “8 minutes to disaster“, charting the trials and tribulations of an ambulance crew around Reading. The titular time-frame refers to the central mandated target (grumble government bureaucracy grumble) of how long the crews have between receiving a top-priority call and getting to the scene of the incident. In amongst much of the usual diabolical behaviour of drunken idiots in proximity to the NHS, there was one scene in particular that struck me. Mainly because I see most things through an OpenStreetMap filter nowadays, but…

The ambulance crew were responding to one such high-priority call, to respond to house 54 on a street of which I can’t remember the name. They had been told it had a brown door, and when they found house 53 with the other half of the semi having a brown door, they jumped out and started pounding on it. A few seconds later a neighbour helpfully pointed out that it was an unmarked “53a”, so they jumped in the ambulance, and set off again. Finding house 54 further down the street, they again jumped out, but the wrong colour on the door gave the first indication they were now on the wrong street, so jumping back in the ambulance and taking the other fork in the road got them to the correct house 54, with a brown door, and when they finally got to the patient, he was dead.

Now admittedly the patient in question had been dead for a few days, so 3 minutes of faffing around didn’t cause him any significant ill effects, but when the first scene of the program was a man quite literally bleeding out, it shows such things can make all the difference. And I was surprised that the crew didn’t have some massively overcomplicated, Accenture-procured multi-million pound GPS system that had house numbers built in. Actually, now I think about it, it’s probably best they didn’t - having been involved in the periphery of a few NHS IT projects, I can say they are the best way yet conceived of turning gob-smackingly large amounts of taxpayers money into things that simply just don’t work. So these paramedics are probably better off with a consumer device that other consumers have willingly chosen to pay for with their own hard-earned cash, rather than involving bureaucrats, even though it can’t help them find particular houses in a timely manner. I’ve seen similar issues on other emergency-services documentaries - police getting stuck in housing estates due to barriers simply not on their commercial GPSes.

So the OpenStreetMap tie-in comes from having spent the last few weeks starting to look into what comes next for OpenStreetMap after we’ve mapped every road, pub and cycle route in the country (hey, what seemed wildly ambitious just two years ago is becoming increasing routinely anticipated), and what’s technically known as “Addressing” is part of that. It involves taking things one step further than just knowing where each road is, and getting to the point where we know where each house on each road is. Now that’s a whole lot of work, but in bits and pieces across Europe OSM volunteers are starting to try things out. Dave has made a start around our area - see his sketch above - which is made up of fiendishly complex blocks of flats and Matt has done some stuff near our office. Frederik and Jochen from GeoFabrik have even made a tool for helping spot mistakes in the data. There’s a lot of potential here, but a lot of hard work, but with everything in OSM it’s a case of when, not if.

So here’s hoping that in the next year or two we’ll see consumer devices working from the world’s best global community-generated open-source mapping-cum-routing-come-addressing-cum-everything-else dataset, helping ambulance drivers (and pizza delivery guys, for that matter) from here to, well, everywhere. And maybe it’ll be only a few years between us saying “OpenStreetMap is pretty accurate, but I wouldn’t use it for routing ambulances” to saying “OpenStreetMap is pretty accurate, especially for routing ambulances”. It’ll be awesome.

A well dressed man approaches me on Queens Gate, and asks if I know where the nearest petrol stations are. He says he’s already been to the one at the bottom of Queens Gate, but he needs to find an independent station. As I’m considering which is closer - the one at the other end of High Street Ken, or the one that Dan Climas went to in minibuses which is down towards Chelsea - he starts talking himself into a hole. He’s run out of petrol, he’s just up from Kent for the evening with his wife, he forgot his jacket so he doesn’t have his wallet, Shell will only give you free petrol if you have your driving license (huh?), but of course it’s in his wallet which he doesn’t have. Finally, the short con comes to its conclusion - whilst waving a bunch of car keys and a mobile phone, he offers to give me his details. He didn’t get to ask for cash before I walked off.

He’s probably unlucky that this happened to me a few months ago in a quiet part of East Putney - a guy shouted across the road to me, and started waving keys and talking about petrol. It’s a bit hard, since if the story was legit, the only option you would have is to approach strangers and rely on their generosity. But in both cases, it’s word for word exactly how a short con would play out, so I walked away both that time, and last night.

Most times when I get approached by people looking for change to get the tube home, I say no (although my plan for next time is to offer to top up their few coins if they are actually willing to put them into a ticket machine!).

I think I’ve fallen for a short con once when I was drunk and walking home through Chelsea many years ago - a well dressed drunk guy on a Friday night had lost his wallet and asked for directions to Victoria Mainline, and needed some cash. He seemed perfectly legitimate, but again, it would happen exactly the same way if he had been a con artist, so he probably was. Nowadays I’m much more sceptical - I’ll hear people out, up until they ask for cash. If they can come up with some way of me helping that doesn’t involve them getting cash - say, asking me to buy the petrol and put it in their car, or asking me to buy them a ticket, they would be slightly more likely to get my help.

The whiteboard at Baron’s Court tube is the best whiteboard I’ve found on the Underground. Which is a weird thing to say, but bear with me.

I’ve noticed over the last year that I’ve been working at Charing Cross Hospital, and hence using the station, that there is someone there who takes their customer services seriously - and use the whiteboard to express themselves. There’s often a “thought of the day” for people to peruse, but today was much better - a list of common oyster card error codes, with what they mean. And importantly, it was phrased as what it means for the customer, not the system - so 94 meain “Step back and try again” instead of Card Communications Failed, or “The person in front got through on your card” rather than “Double entry attempted”. Like I say, it’s little things like this which show the customer service focus. I wonder who it is that writes all these things (and whether they ever get hassle from management for showing creativity!)

I think Ed has bugged our flat, or that there’s only one good topic of conversation at the moment. Petrol buying.

Last night I called it a “Nash Economics” thing, which sounds better than Ed’s “game theory” label, is certainly more pretenious, and almost definitely wide of the mark. But it reminds me of the theory bit in “A Beautiful Mind”, so as far as I’m concerned, it is “Nash Economics”. Accuracy be damned.

Panic buying can be rationally justified as the following:

1. If there’s no more petrol left, I’ll be screwed
2. If there’s going to be no more petrol, I need to make sure I have plenty
3. There’ll be no more petrol if everyone else panic buys
4. Everyone is going to panic buy
5. I’d better get some petrol, quick

Of course, if there’s no supply interruptions, 3 doesn’t hold. And you can argue that this whole thing is caused by the media, since they have almost certainly caused 4. But I do find it a beautiful scenario, since every individual acting rationally actually causes the problem they’re all trying to avoid.

I’ve been fairly annoyed to see that London Underground have removed all of the bins from the network over the last few weeks. For the first few years that I used the underground there were no bins around - and so I’ve left many fast food drink containers, stella cans and various other bits and pieces on top of chocolate machines in my time. Slowly but surely, bins were introduced: wall mounted lids, with clear plastic bin bags hanging beneath. A happy compromise between ’security’ and basic civil infrastructure. All hunky dory.

But now ’security’ is prevailing once more, and the bins have been removed. I hope they reconsider, and the fact that so the metal wall-mounted frames remain is a good sign. But it’s once more quite annoying to cart rubbish around the network - I used to nip off of trains to leave my orange peel behind; now I need to clutch it till I get outside.

At East Putney this morning, I was heartily cheered to see that someone had tied a supermarket bag to the empty frame, and there was a bin once more, full of coffee cups and such. I think if the people were to speak, we would say ‘we’d rather have the bins back, thank you’.

Quickly now, before they fix it. How to get from South Ken to Crystal Palace, via Shepherds Bush, Kew and most of London. If you’re in a taxi, make sure they aren’t using Google Maps for navigation…