The London Streets Challenge

I've been mildly obsessed with the street-name comparison tool from ITO World over the last couple of weeks. It measures how many correctly named roads OpenStreetMap has in the UK by comparing it against the Ordnance Survey's OS Locator dataset. We also get to mark where corrections are needed in the OS data - even they aren't perfect!

According to the combination of the OS data combined with our list of corrections, OpenStreetMap (and hence OpenCycleMap) today has 600,414 correctly named streets - just over 70% of the total. What's more, in the last week alone we added 4,699 more streets - in the last 31 days we've added a whopping 19,309. If we keep this up we'll be done in about 13 months, but I hope we can up the rate even further.

London Completeness

One particularly eye-catching part of the ITO World analysis is the map showing where we have good and bad coverage (unsurprisingly, good in the cities, bad in rural areas - we kinda knew that already). Areas are coloured red through yellow and finally turn blue at the 95% completion level - which throws up a couple of surprises like Orkney and Shetland being blue and Tandridge on the outskirts of London still being red. That lead me to ponder a challenge for our London Pub Meetups:

Every time a London area gets beyond 95% - i.e. turns blue on the map - we'll have a celebratory pub meetup in that area.

We discussed this at the last pub meetup (although Harry is being a bit harsh if we're going to wait for 100%, I reckon 95% is close enough for now!). Not counting those that are over 95% already, we've had our first winner - Barking and Dagenham! Congratulations to all involved, and I invite someone to step forward and nominate a nice pub for the rest of us to come and visit.

If Barking seems like a bit of a trek for you to get to, then that's the motivation to improve areas closer to home!

For the record, there were 9 areas already blue before I opened the challenge - Redbridge, City of Westminster, Camden, Brent, Southwark, Kensington and Chelsea, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey. Perhaps these areas can be opened to the 100% challenge instead!

This post was posted on 2 February 2011 and tagged General