I wish I could be so confident - I carry print outs of OS maps as backups when walking Munros in the Highlands and I frequently encounter people who don't have maps. I've even had people ask me on fairly non-obvious Munros which mountain they were on - I gave them my backup map.
Mind you they were locals so probably hadn't been raised with dire warnings about going into the hills unprepared.
Edit: I notice that "lost" is a significant entry in mountain rescue statistics:
I suppose somewhere like Ben Nevis maybe 90% of the people you meet won't have a map and it is possible that places like this will represent a large proportion of the total people you meet when doing a round. So maybe it does make sense that you frequently encounter people without a map doing Munros just because most of the people you encounter are on Munros like Ben Nevis
But the restriction to "non-obvious" Munros doesn't match with my experience
Sorry - I meant that I personally have only ever spoken to people who didn't appear to know where they were a couple of times and they happened to be on what I would have thought were slightly odd hills for someone to just wander up. In both cases they asked me where they were and I gave them a map and showed them where they were - which I hoped helped.
I have spoken to other people on popular hills who didn't have maps - but at least they knew where they were (if perhaps a bit vague about the way up/down....).
Reminds me of when I encountered people on top of Kinder Scout the day after heavy rainfall trying to navigate across the middle using Google maps. Surprisingly, their map showed a path. There is no path, even though there is a right of way. OS shows the right of way, but I imagine OS map users would know that right of way doesn't mean "path".
On OSM I have made efforts to tag the physical properties of a way separately to any enshrined rights but it's hard to get right.
I've used GPS to navigate for many years now. I used to carry paper maps, but you need a compass (and the ability to use it) to make it useful if you get lost in the moors or something. I just carry a backup Garmin now instead of paper maps.
Entertainingly, at least in retrospect, I made the same mistake a couple of times when I switched to using GPS - I descended the wrong ridge from a top. No real harm done but I do think GPS made me pay less attention to where I was than I would have before when mainly using a paper map.
It is this principle of making you pay for stuff twice that goes on with the British government. Even postcodes and weather data get this tax.
In the US if the federal government makes something then the tax payer has paid for it and it is therefore there for the tax payer to use. So pretty pictures from NASA and the zip code database and even weather observations/predictions are all there for the taking.
In the UK the tax payer has paid for Ordnance Survey already but you have to pay for the maps and get fully extorted to use them in your own publications. There was a time when photocopying an OS map in the library for a planning application was fraught with difficulty.
That is why the Google people were clever with Street View - they built their own maps and are not beholden to OS.
So it is not as if the government goes out of its way to furnish the UK population with the best maps it can. It hoards the map data. It is tantamount to victim blaming to berate those caught on the dales during bad weather with no map other than that which came with the dead battery on their phone.
The OS work for the crown and not the people. If Slow Ways had gone OpenStreetMap you can bet the landing page would have the map around your British house with routes highlighted.
I think that's being a bit hard on the OS - I think they've been pushed by different governments over the years to become more commercial and hard-nosed about raising revenue wherever they can. I'm actually pretty surprised they haven't been privatised.
The OS and Met Office (and various other bodies) are established as Trading Funds. That means that they are responsible for their income and expenditure and have to balance their own books - the government pays for services in the same way that the private sector does. If the OS didn't sell its data, the government would have to pay a lot more to have the range and quality of cartographic services that are available.
It's also worth saying that government departments are free to purchase mapping (or weather) services from other agencies in the free market, and I've seen OSM based providers winning contracts before.
Finally, weather data is made freely available by the Met Office, but it is the forecasts are commercial. The same base data is used by eg Meteo Group for their forecasts.
>>In the US if the federal government makes something then the tax payer has paid for it and it is therefore there for the tax payer to use.
That's absolutely not always the case - just in 2018 the fedral government spent nearly $100 billion dollars[0] of taxpayer money on research, and yet nearly all of the results are locked behind journalistic paywalls or others.
Because most of the routes have not been tested yet - all of them have been put together by volunteers during quarantine. And, from experience, even though they've been constructed from public footpaths, that's no guarantee of their quality. Paths can be fenced off by landowners, go through cattle fields or be outright missing.
Making all the routes available without at least a brief check could lead to less-experienced walkers getting lost or injured.
From experience they will and it’ll also be a foot deep in cow shit (I do a lot of walking in U.K.). That needs to be listed on the routes.
Common hazards and inconveniences such as flooding need to be listed. I had to Wade knee deep in slurry once where a river had flooded into a muck pile. I considered throwing my legs away with my shoes after that.
Cows yes, bulls no. There are exceptions but generally it's not legal to leave bulls alone without cows in fields that have public rights of way. We walk through fields with cows all the time, it can sometimes be uncomfortable if they come close but I've never felt in danger except when there was a bull. Two walkers have been killed by cows this year, although that's not typical.
Whilst the idea of a national cycle network is commendable, the current routes include choppy pavements right next to dual carriageways with only a grass verge separating you from 70mph traffic (A64 west of York, for example). This is neither a pleasant experience nor anyone’s idea of a safe cycling route.
Cycling in The Netherlands opened my eyes to how utterly backwards we are in relation to cycling in the UK.
We need behind-the-hedgerow and across-the-fields separated cycle routes where families can get to everywhere they want to go without feeling threatened by idiots in Audis.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 80.1 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24799177
In my experience of walking on dartmoor most people are intelligent enough to realise that they build prisons on moors for a reason, so have maps.
Mind you they were locals so probably hadn't been raised with dire warnings about going into the hills unprepared.
Edit: I notice that "lost" is a significant entry in mountain rescue statistics:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-54158079
I suppose somewhere like Ben Nevis maybe 90% of the people you meet won't have a map and it is possible that places like this will represent a large proportion of the total people you meet when doing a round. So maybe it does make sense that you frequently encounter people without a map doing Munros just because most of the people you encounter are on Munros like Ben Nevis
But the restriction to "non-obvious" Munros doesn't match with my experience
I have spoken to other people on popular hills who didn't have maps - but at least they knew where they were (if perhaps a bit vague about the way up/down....).
On OSM I have made efforts to tag the physical properties of a way separately to any enshrined rights but it's hard to get right.
I've used GPS to navigate for many years now. I used to carry paper maps, but you need a compass (and the ability to use it) to make it useful if you get lost in the moors or something. I just carry a backup Garmin now instead of paper maps.
If you haven't got a GPS, your best bet is just to take a bearing and walk in a straight line.
In the US if the federal government makes something then the tax payer has paid for it and it is therefore there for the tax payer to use. So pretty pictures from NASA and the zip code database and even weather observations/predictions are all there for the taking.
In the UK the tax payer has paid for Ordnance Survey already but you have to pay for the maps and get fully extorted to use them in your own publications. There was a time when photocopying an OS map in the library for a planning application was fraught with difficulty.
That is why the Google people were clever with Street View - they built their own maps and are not beholden to OS.
So it is not as if the government goes out of its way to furnish the UK population with the best maps it can. It hoards the map data. It is tantamount to victim blaming to berate those caught on the dales during bad weather with no map other than that which came with the dead battery on their phone.
The OS work for the crown and not the people. If Slow Ways had gone OpenStreetMap you can bet the landing page would have the map around your British house with routes highlighted.
https://weownit.org.uk/public-ownership/ordnance-survey
Edit: OS maps are 'freely' available through Bing Maps.
It's also worth saying that government departments are free to purchase mapping (or weather) services from other agencies in the free market, and I've seen OSM based providers winning contracts before.
Finally, weather data is made freely available by the Met Office, but it is the forecasts are commercial. The same base data is used by eg Meteo Group for their forecasts.
That's absolutely not always the case - just in 2018 the fedral government spent nearly $100 billion dollars[0] of taxpayer money on research, and yet nearly all of the results are locked behind journalistic paywalls or others.
[0] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf
This commercialization is a direct result of government policy. They remove funding, and tell agencies to make up the difference in sales.
The Tory-LibDem coalition government was the start, and the following governments pushed further for it.
NB Police Scotland have been urging to be better prepared when going into the hills, so I don't think its just me!
https://www.northern-times.co.uk/news/police-scotland-urge-h...
Show us the draft routes in an interactive viewer, please. The page at the moment is a glorified mailing list sign-up box.
Making all the routes available without at least a brief check could lead to less-experienced walkers getting lost or injured.
1. Create navigation app using OpenStreetMaps
2. Add the new routes as red
3. Let user choose a route to walk (warn if he chooses a red one)
4. At the end ask user a few questions (how hard, how pretty, are there shops on the road, how dangerous)
5. Update the route metadata in the App
6. When there's enough data change the color to green and remove warnings
You could even add average speed and sell ads to local pubs/museums/etc.
Common hazards and inconveniences such as flooding need to be listed. I had to Wade knee deep in slurry once where a river had flooded into a muck pile. I considered throwing my legs away with my shoes after that.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-5...
> We are currently working on building a website that will host all of the routes and hope to launch that later this year.
https://www.sustrans.org.uk/national-cycle-network
I'd hope they're working together, to be honest..
Cycling in The Netherlands opened my eyes to how utterly backwards we are in relation to cycling in the UK.
We need behind-the-hedgerow and across-the-fields separated cycle routes where families can get to everywhere they want to go without feeling threatened by idiots in Audis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Hiking_Markers_System
online maps: https://mapy.cz/turisticka (zoom in anywhere)