The Carlow County task had been one of the first to be finished since the start of the OSMIrl_buildings project started, finished in May of 2020, to be precise. Naturally, that mapping data had become somewhat out of date, so I decided to open a task for just the town to keep it simple. Also, most building activity is to be expected in the largest town.
I chose the Census 2015 boundary as the task boundary, because I figured that it would encompass most of what is considered Carlow town, even though there is quite a bit of Graiguecullen included in that which is famously in Laois, as our former intern Ciara demonstrated so convincingly some years back.
Thanks to the bank holiday weekend, it only took three days to finish the task, even though I was the only mapper working on it. The validation was also very quickly finished by two validators (dcapillae with 363 tasks and jonnymccullagh with 21 – THANK YOU!).
So, now for some statistics to show that it was all worth it:
Building statistics
| building tag | number 14 October 20241 | number 30 October 20242 |
|---|---|---|
* | 11,200 | 12,423 |
yes | 3,100 | 1,532 |
house | 7,200 | 9,513 |
terrace | 2 | 0 |
farm_auxiliary | 6 | 28 |
shed | 431 | 731 |
garage | 35 | 160 |
greenhouse | 13 | 20 |
retail | 44 | 91 |
commercial | 65 | 76 |
industrial | 21 | 28 |
school | 21 | 153 |
public | 4 | 5 |
hospital | 2 | 2 |
church | 7 | 7 |
addr:street | 2,000 | 3,483 |
Even though the number in total was only raised by c.1,200 buildings (due to splitting and the mapping of newly build buildings), the detail in the building tags was certainly increased.
There were two problem noticed: For one, there were several instances of “addr:street=.” on buildings, where the street name was not mapped on the highway. An overpass-turbo query was run for Carlow, and then the whole island and parts of the UK, and other (few) cases in London were detected and corrected. The other issue were duplicate house numbers where sometimes up to eight houses in the same estate had the same house number which was probably due to a copy & paste mistake. Since it was impossible to determine on satellite imagery which house had the correct one, they were all deleted.
Traffic related statistics
| tag | number 14 October 2024 | number 30 October 2024 |
|---|---|---|
highway=* | 218km | 244km |
highway=footway | 16.2km | 21.6km |
highway=service | 49.6km | 63.3 |
traffic_calming=table | 36 | 96 |
traffic_calming=bump | 14 | 23 |
highway=stop | 42 | 104 |
highway=give_way | 9 | 43 |
highway=street_lamp | 30 | 88 |
highway=crossing | 94 | 227 |
Adding the traffic signs and traffic calming features should make Carlow safer for pedestrians, provided that the sat navs in the cars alert the driver to those features as is possible in OSMAnd, for example.
Nature related statistics
| tag | number 14 October 2024 | number 30 October 2024 |
|---|---|---|
natural=tree | 124 | 466 |
landuse=grass | 100828.3 ㎡ | 294449.6 ㎡ |
What next?
There are quite a few street names missing in Carlow, especially in newer housing estates, so if someone is in the are and could get their StreetComplete out to add the missing ones, it would be a great help.
The next task opened after Carlow was Dundalk which is already completed and awaiting validation. The tasks currently being mapped are still Co. Down and new a reduced Co. Louth.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
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