Shitholes

So that smart Muti guy has figured that OSM has crap mapping for crap towns. We are 90% complete for London and 275% complete for Karlsruhe but when it comes to some town up north beginning with N, our mappers don’t even go there, sister.



Although we have at least put the railway station on the railway line rather than, for example, 750m offshore. Well done on that one, Ed. Also we don’t have a completely bogus motorway to the south.

Personally I don’t see why we need to map places where noone wants to go - it sounds like Schrodinger’s PND to me.

But maybe I can explain why “the gap between affluent and deprived LSOAs is growing”, which Nick translates for me as “the percentage of shitholes in OSM is going down”.

Back in the day we had mapping parties and all the old-school crowd turned up. We spent the day cycling around shitholes and dropping Gekos (remember them?) onto concrete. Then we came back to some room for which we had lost the key, spent two hours trying to upload the first node to the API, then went to the pub.

These days all the old-school crowd have got girlfriends, or spend all their time writing Fake blogs, or have been made redundant so can’t afford to travel to mapping parties any more. So we don’t have parties any more (look if you don’t believe me).

But, we figure, we have 10,000 new mappers per day (PR guy please check stats, thanks) so we don’t need parties.

Actually all the new mappers are still middle-class geeks who want to map their neighbourhood. It's rare that you find a rags-to-riches hero like me who has made their way up from the mean streets of Surrey. So the shitholes no longer get mapped.

Let’s make 2010 the Year of the Shithole Mapping Party and git those crap towns mapped. Or maybe we could wait until April and just lift the Ordnance Survey’s data. Tough call.