Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend the Birmingham Cycling Forum meeting this week at which Councillor Huxtable and the BCC cycling team presented the Bike Birmingham, BCC's "A Sustainable City's Cycling Strategy". Having read the document in full I'm pleased to see that many areas have been addressed following the earlier draft of some time ago and it is clear that the consultation prior to publication has been worthwhile.

However I'm left with the feeling that BCC have missed some significant opportunities and the document as a whole doesn’t convince me that some of the aspirations can be delivered. Indeed in some areas no aspiration appears to have been set at all and in others they appear woefully low.

Two major omissions come through. Firstly there is not one mention of actual funding, without any reference to the business case how can such a strategy be delivered or the aims and results be monitored by stakeholders and the public. Several aspirations are qualified with a "subject to funding" and for other aspirations there is no mention at all of how it is proposed to fund, seek funding internally, or the opportunities for external funding.

Secondly the document includes many collaborations with other internal BCC departments and groups and some external stakeholders but does not mention once "The Big Society" ie how the public as individuals or groups my help and drive forward the strategy and BCC's aims. In my view this is a serious omission, especially considering the clear limit to funds within BCC to drive the strategy forwards.

At the detail level I made the following observations.

1. Context (p5, para 2) -  How (practically) will Bike Birmingham be promoted within The Core Strategy and LTP3.

2. Context (p6, para 3) - Questions are asked here that should have been answered in order to produce the strategy. There was an opportunity to find the answers during the consultation phase.

3. Supporting City Priorities (p7) - There is no mention of infrastructure in the main priorities. Infrastructure improvements is identified elsewhere in the document as a core need (eg p11, para 2 and p13, 3rd bullet) so surely should be in the priority list. If its not there because of a lack of funding then this needs to be clearly stated and discussion included on how additional funding might be obtained, even if aspirational.

4. Supporting Transport and Sports Strategies (p9) - Why are Bike Birmingham's aspirations that will be included in LTP3 not included in the document? Surely Bike Birmingham stands as a strategy document in its own right and should state its aspirations?

5. Bikeability Birmingham (p9) - Statistics on how much Bikeability training has been delivered to date would be useful.

6. Bike It (p9) - How might Bikeability and Sustrans Bike It be combined to deliver a coherent message and programme?

7. Birmingham Sport and Physical Activity Strategy 2009-2013 (p11, final para) - All, not just appropriate cycling information and monitoring results should be published as per Government recommendations for Open Data access. The public needs to be able to monitor how the strategy is working in practice.

8. Coordination, Priorities and Early Action 1 (p17, para 4) - The DFT journey planner is known to be flawed due to a poor user interface for cyclists. The number of cycling routes planned on the DFT journey planner is significantly lower than for instance those on cyclestreets.net and BCC could save a considerable amount of money by ditching the journey planner and supporting an open source zero or low cost alternative. This would be an example of Big Society in practice.

9. The Targets; Batch 2 - Safety, Training and Crime (p21) - Clarification is needed on child Bikability training numbers with respect to total numbers of children receiving training as a percentage of student numbers and how this is changing or proposed to change year on year. With 12,665 students completing KS4 education (2008/9 year) it would appear that only a small fraction of students have access to training.

10. The Targets; Batch 2 - Safety, Training and Crime (p21) – The figures proposed for Adult cycle training by 2012 is far too low. It is for instance much lower than the number of adults in Birmingham who might take up a Cycle to Work scheme bike but have no access to training (or even be offered any as a matter of course). Opportunity exists surely to work with major employers for training to be offered under a sponsorship scheme. The document realises (p28, para 1) that employers have a major role to play but this opportunity doesn’t appear to have been developed as part of the document.

11. Coordination, Priorities and Early Action 2 (p22, para 3) – There is no strategy for increasing cycle training to meet the aspirations of increased cycling take-up in the rest of the document despite training being recognised as an important facilitator to improving take-up of cycling in the city.

12. The Targets: Batch 3 - “Facilities” (p25) – The document states that the cycling input to the Route Management Strategies was to be made by the end of 2010. Therefore this could have been included in a document published in February 2011.

Overall I'm pleased that BCC now has a strategy in place, I'm disappointed it isn’t stronger for the reasons given above and for these reasons it may not succeed in its stated aims. But at least its a start from which as a wider community of cyclists we can move forwards. As a Sustrans volunteer and member of the Connect2 steering group building new cycling routes in north east Birmingham I shall continue to work to realise real improvements on the ground, something that I think all too often gets lost in the waffle of a strategic document. Lets hope that through pressure and support we can see BCC working with the cycling community to realise real improvements with what we all know is likely to be limited resources for the foreseeable future. Its clear as a cycling community we can do more together, and we may have to if BCC is unable to deliver on its expectations.

 

 

The latest promotional wheeze from Barclaycard landed via my letterbox the other day, the usual award scheme that might or might not take off and be marginally useful. But anyway, what took my notice was a map on the back.

The leader above the map is clearly incorrect because what it should say is:

"To show you just how difficult it is to earn and spend Reward Money with Barclaycard Freedom, we've included this sh*te map of your local area featuring no road names and a selection of totally unidentifiable selection of retailers we have invited to take part. Please note, we actually guessed where and who these retailers might be and we have stuck 5 random push pins on the map to make it look cool but really unhelpful.......”

Finally got my response to the GI Consultation paper out before the deadline.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee enthusing briefly about the open data movement including
audience applause for the OpenStreetMap Haiti mapping effort.

http://is.gd/a15Y1

Ride the wave!

SteveC's OpenGeoData post a few days ago,
http://opengeodata.org/new-design-concept-for-openstreetmaporg, started some
general discussion about redesigning the http://www.osm.org entry page and
he followed it up with a rather provoking longer piece,
http://opengeodata.org/thoughts-on-osm-design-and-looking-forward-an, which
carries useful insight into the issues that the project is facing but also
criticism directed at the contribution of some of the openstreetmap
volunteers. Now I'm not here to take sides in any argument, there is
probably reasonable validity in the original article and in the various
follow-up posts on the OSM Talk mailing list but is all of this really going
to move us forward? While it can be a fine line between motivating and
demotivating volunteers, especially if you want the best out of them, first
and foremost OSM works best when the community acts together for its own
good. Firing pot shots from the protection of the upper circle doesn't
really help.

Tom Hughes, the projects chief sysadmins, wrote a measured response to the
questions posed in SteveC's original OGD post,
http://compton.nu/2010/02/redesigning-the-openstreetmap-web-site/ which
partly points to the usual best practice of working to a brief. We have
never had a design brief for the site entry page to OSM.org. Perhaps its
time we did.

Before considering a design brief, questions need to be answered, and those
of us close to OSM can only provide a subset of these answers, the rest need
to come from the wider internet community.

Question 1. Who are our customers?

The answer to this question helps set the main criteria for any brief. I and
I'm sure anyone else can name a few logical customers, but I wouldn't want
to prejudge the outcome. Stick a simple feedback popup on the OSM website
and we would quickly find out who our visiting customers actually are.

Question 2. What do our customers want?

The answer to this question is only possible once you know your customer
base. Each customer type needs to be asked a different set of questions.
With the answers to these it's possible to debate whether we wish to meet
the customer expectation or not and even whether or not to meet the needs of
all customer types.

Its only after we have answers to the above two questions that it's possible
to consider setting a design brief, or scope for change.

Assuming we get this far, what next?

We don't have to solve these issues ourselves, either individually or
collectively. A solution should emerge if we empower.

The first step would simply be to turn the above question answers into the
technical and design components. This can probably be done best in a hack
day (or as an OSMF working group) where those with sufficient knowledge of
the project can define the possible tasks. It would not be up to this group
to decide if any task should be carried out.

The second step would then be for the OSM community to give its views on
each of the identified tasks, only those tasks which the community really
doesn't wish to see as part of the project would be eliminated.

The final step would be to write the task list up into a design brief. A
scope of work. This would then be circulated widely within and outwith the
community to empower individuals and organisations to compete with each
other to respond to the whole brief or logical elements of it. The "working
group" can look at tasks which can and should be grouped together into
logical elements to ensure that the end results can integrate together. It
might also decide if it needs more API functionality to help the process
along.

I'm not suggesting anything beyond this point because it's really unclear to
me what response we might get and I suspect that the responses themselves
will be the real driver for change. We know what we can achieve as a mapping
group, the Haiti experience being just one example, so how about empowering
other groups to do the same for us.

Cheers

Andy

It wasn’t long ago that I noted Google Maps in Birmingham had added lots of local amenity/retail POI’s but alas most were way off position from the buildings in which they actually reside. Now I spot that gmaps has started to add 3D buildings to Birmingham and suddenly as if by magic the city centre is starting to look both more logical and more useful. Many POI’s are still way off and some areas just look plain confusing, such as New Street Station (
View Larger Map), but clearly the folks at Google have realised they need to catch up with OpenStreetMap in terms of the level of detail on their maps. Which means we OSM folks are going to have to do the same. Our 2D building layouts (http://osm.org/go/euzMLJUKD-) may be fine for now but in time I suspect only a virtual city centre will do.